Marco Arment:
It’s easy for most of us around these parts to forget how badly technology still works for so many people. This is supposed to be the best we have today: an iPad, a routine OS update, an Apple Store, an automatic backup feature.
But even the iPad, while easy to use for routine tasks, still shows its computer heritage in clunky, ugly, techie ways like software updates and restores. And while Apple Stores have a reputation for great service, there are enough counterexamples happening every day that I’m not sure how much longer that reputation will last.
Arment recounts some recent tribulations his elderly grandparents have suffered with a data migration facilitated with an Apple Genius at their local store. The story doesn’t knock Apple Stores or Geniuses, but it does highlight some of the issues that unsophisticated Apple product users (or as I like to think of them, muggles) still face with Apple technology.
If my grandparents were still alive, I would have done exactly what Marco did.
Small steps.
My father-in-law’s used Windows PCs for much of his career, but I know he’s of a certain age and culture that switching him to the Mac will only result in my wife and I becoming his daily call center for tech support.
I’ve had great over the phone customer support from Apple, but over e-mail I’ve found them to be abysmal.
I preordered an album recently and at the time a single from the album was downloaded into my iTunes and I was charged for it – which apparently is the norm, but it looked to me like a mistake since they don’t explain to you that when the album comes out they’ll deduct the single’s cost from the album’s cost.
I wrote to Apple support explaining exactly what happened, and they nuked my account – to protect me from fraud. It took me nearly a week to get everything back up and running again so I could purchase songs, rent movies, and purchase apps again – any of the stuff you do every day and take for granted. I only managed to get it fixed by getting phone support involved, while the people on the e-mail end denied a fix could be made and were adamant they did the right thing. The people on the phone disagreed.
I know my way around my Mac, and Apple in general, and I still got boned. I can only imagine what would happen to an Apple muggle in the same situation.
The bigger issue isn’t what the genius did or didn’t do but rather even if he asked all the right questions the grandfather is too uneducated to have been guaranteed to give the right answer. Apple doesn’t and has never warrantied user data and in most states legally can not back up data to their systems, which is required during the iOS 4 to 5 process or it has to wipe the data. The Genius could have explained this and Grandfather said okay without really understanding what was being said. But if the reply was a confident one how is the Genius to know that he didn’t understand.
There is also a bit of a failure on Marco’s part as he fronts to understand iOS as being part of a developer and yet it sounds like he sent his grandfather to have icloud turned on to backup synced from the computer music etc. Marco, if he really knew as much as he wants us to believe, would know that iCloud backups skip synced media on the assumption you still have he computer it came from. So he added to the fail because it sounds like he led Grandfather to believe everything would be on iCloud and the PC could be trashed which isn’t true.
I feel ya. I was thinking about switching my great-aunt who I support. She went forever without a computer and then at about age 75 decided it was time to get with it. So a few years back we got her a Dell notebook running Vista. (ick, I know) because she could take classes on it at a local senior center.
She’s on it all the time now, and in hindsight it would be so much easier to have put her on something like an iPad (that didn’t exist) – however she’s really taken to it and on her own researched and bought a Nook reader. (Again, not my first choice, but it fit her needs better based on her research.)
For the record. Yeah he does knock the Genius. A couple of times. He doesn’t scream and tell or cuss but it is there rather clearly. Particularly that ‘not the first time’ comment
Maybe he’s relatively chill about it because, although he doesn’t say it, he knows he failed with his assumption.
Glad your great-aunt was proactive with what you provided. My father-in-law’s a former executive-type. He makes up names for anything that doesn’t have to do with chemical engineering, construction contracts, and logistics, which means he can figure some stuff out, but can’t necessarily describe it to anyone so’s they’d know what he was talking about.
You’d send them to the Apple Store without verifying what would happen so you could prepare them? You would tell them to use something that doesn’t do what they need it to do?
Hope not, for your grandparents sake
Not sure what’s up with Marco of late, but he’s definitely gone the way of Pogue to the anti-Apple side quite a bit. First he’s proclaiming the Mac App Store is about to become a deserted waste land because of Apple’s sandboxing policies and that he’ll never buy an app from the store again if he has a choice. (However, ask him to speak to the security benefits/tradeoffs of sandboxing as a developer as a follow-up to that article and he’s silent.)
Now we’re to believe Apple’s days of having a good customer service reputation are at an end because his grandparents had a bit of trouble moving data to a device. Yes, I’m sure a decade dedicated to providing the best service in this, by nature, difficult industry will be thrown over in a jiffy as a result.
Throw in Marco blocking a site like 9to5Mac (not a site I personally care for) from Instapaper because the site’s owner/editor pissed him off, and you get the picture of a guy with a bit of a short fuse.
I have to imagine Marco’s shift on Apple is in no small part related to Apple treading heavily on his core business. The built in read later feature of Safari, with offline reading, and now even iCloud tabs make Instapaper much less necessary. But, I guess that would annoy the best of us.