Apart from the device that still work: if you have a problem with one and it's the manufacturers fault, don't you think they should do something? They apparently just ignore until they get sued. Is that not a problem for you?
You missed the point about the selection bias: What makes the news are the instances when they haven’t done enough. The millions of times when they
have done things right aren’t considered newsworthy.
Reports are that Apple fans are becoming weary of the expensive treadmill.
Top end phone sales are in a downturn in favor of more sensibly priced models.
Share prices of Apple suppliers fall on ‘deeper trough’ of iPhone X sales
https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/24/iphone-x-sales-apple-suppliers/
Almost nobody wants the iPhone X
"But analysts say that tide is shifting: Dramatically fewer people are buying the latest iPhones."
https://qz.com/1260811/apples-second-quarter-2018-analyst-expect-poor-iphone-x-sales/
etc.....
Bear in mind that it’s become an annual sport to report that [latest iPhone model] sales are down, only for Apple to announce a few months later that it’s been a smashing success. The “analysts” IMHO often are using their own anal cavity as their primary source of data.
Apart from the device that still work: if you have a problem with one and it's the manufacturers fault, don't you think they should do something? They apparently just ignore until they get sued. Is that not a problem for you?
As if other manufacturer acted differently....
But if Samsung/ASUS/dell have the same behaviour it is apparently fine
Yup, Apple is held to an entirely diffferent set of standards in the media, and by extension by a lot of popular opinion.
Surveys consistently show Apple’s product reliability to be above average, and customer satisfaction (which is of course a result not only of the devices themselves, but how Apple handles failures if they do occur) to be at the front of the pack, year after year after year. So even with the occasional exception, the overwhelming majority of customers are very happy.
Could you link us to some of the results of these surveys? Because it seems there is about a 50/50 split between owners of Apple devices. Half of the people I speak to have an Apple device but are going to "upgrade" (their word, not mine) to an Android device once their plan is finished or the phone dies because of dissatisfaction.
Look up the surveys from ACPI, JD Powers, etc. Apple continues to be at the front of the pack. Note that I am not saying that others (especially Samsung) are
bad. They’re not.
The other half love their devices for a wide range of reasons or simply don't care.
The vast majority of people don’t care about their devices anywhere near as much as we nerds do.
It just seems to me that there is a high proportion of Apple-owners who are not satisfied either with their devices and/or the service they get (or don't get) from Apple.
Selection bias again: all the people who
are happy don’t really talk about it.
They are also getting frustrated that as manufacturers of Android (and other) OS's continue to innovate, improve and provide wider options, Apple just regurgitate the same crap with a new box.
Except that this is demonstrably untrue.
Look at the market share over the last 5 years alone (which is a far more reliable indicator of than a survey). iOS has claimed on average a 35% market share (in Australia). It's been fairly stable despite the increased uptake in smart phones and tablet devices by consumers (growing about 11% each year). However Android remains dominant at around 65% and growing.
No, market share is a
terrible indicator of satisfaction. High market share is in no way indicative of customer satisfaction, and vice versa, because many factors come into play. Comcast may have the highest market share of ISPs, but its customer satisfaction is abyssmal. Luxury brands like BWM have excellent satisfaction scores but garner single-digit market share. (And nobody thinks they're wrong for doing this.)
Apple has never chased market share in earnest. Its primary goals continue to be customer satisfaction and
profit. And one key element to this strategy is, plain and simply, avoiding the low end of the market, where cheap products reduce customer satisfaction and at the same time have razor-thin profit margins. (John Gruber has written about market share vs profit share extensively.)
In a nutshell, no matter what the Apple haters say, the proof is in the pudding: Apple customers keep coming back. There is no coercion, no religion, no cult. Just a large group of largely satisfied customers. A self-selected minority of exceptions doesn’t disprove the overall picture.
I think you'd be a little naive to think that all Apple owners are returning, simply because they like their products. There is also a significant portion who are not technically minded, who stick with Apple products not because they necessarily want to, but because they find switching just too difficult or too daunting.
It’s not naïveté, my list of reasons was not exhaustive, I listed only a few. And I actually did mention a related topic (investment in ecosystem), which together with your comment basically form a signficant barrier to switching, namely, friction. Switching from any platform to another involves friction, and for someone to bother, the benefits of switching must exceed the friction. And frankly, for most people, the benefits aren’t big enough. We saw this with computers: despite Windows’ annoyances in its most frustrating days (e.g. Win 95-XP), for most people it
was good enough, and the friction of moving to Mac was great enough to make most people not bother. The advent of the Web, with tons of end-user applications moving from native apps to Web apps, removed a significant source of friction, and we saw an uptick in switchers. But nonetheless, these days
any major OS is adequate for the average user, and so most stick with what they know.
In my experience for every 1 person I hear who love their Apple products and would keep buying them, I get another 1-2 people complain about their past experience with Apple hardware and are either going to switch or have already switched to alternatives. But yes, as you said, the proof is indeed in the pudding.
Louis is absolutely spot on when he said "Consumers need to start thinking better, to think beyond, to think durable, fixable, usable... better."
I will gladly purchase an Apple laptop, smart phone or desktop computer when:
1. Their premium price is backed up by premium, long-lasting and reliable hardware,
2. Their design compliments the user, not restrict them by removing features people like,
3. They allow me to upgrade key components without requiring an electrical engineering background,
4. They allow me to upgrade/repair components myself and be able to get the damned thing back together again, and,
5. When they stop screwing the customer by either bricking their devices, disabling features or deleting user data between software updates.
If those 5 things happen, I will seriously consider an Apple product for myself. Until then, no thanks. I'll stick with the faster, more reliable and more durable alternatives.
1. Data indicates Apple products as having significantly above-average usable lifetimes. (E.g Macs are used on average for 4 years, vs. just 3 for Windows, before replacement. And iPhones receive major OS updates on average for 4 years, vs 2 or less for nearly all Android phones.)
2. There is no
one user. What’s a feature to one user may be a downside to another. (E.g. classic tradeoff between weight and features.) This is why there are different models. But Apple also is very explicit about not trying to be everything to everyone: there are markets they choose not to enter.
3/4. Sorta #2, but I kinda agree with you on this, at least insofar as I think there needs to be at least one properly-upgradeable model available. (I love my 2008 Mac Pro for this reason. Upgrades have kept it eminently usable even at age 10.)
5. Nearly total FUD.
a) Bricking: Device bricking has lots of causes, and frankly most aren’t malicious. (We as EEs of all people should understand this.) The primary reason for component authentication is for security via chain of trust, which is clearly necessary given the amount of private data on a modern device, and the multitude of actors (advertisers, thieves, governments, etc.) who’d love to access our data, and actively try to do so. It does make repair more difficult, and that sucks, I agree. But I’d rather that than a device that is easily compromised.
b) Disabling features: While it does sometimes happen, IMHO this claim is blown wildly out of proportion. There is no question in my mind that iOS and macOS upgrades, on the balance, have added FAR more features than they’ve taken away. (Don’t believe me? Try going back to a version a few versions back. Suddenly you notice all the missing stuff that was slowly added.) The big exception, the one where I agree Apple has taken a lot, is in pro software, especially Mac OS X Server and Final Cut Pro. In the latter especially, the ground-up rewrite meant losing
tons of features that had been accumulated along the way. (The same thing happened in the Pages/Numbers/Keynote and iMovie rewrites, though all of those recovered faster, since their original feature sets were smaller than Final Cut’s, so rebuilding them wasn’t such a daunting task.)
c) Deleting user data between updates: Say what now??? I’ve never lost data in an upgrade, and my iPhone setup has been migrated seamlessly all the way from an original iPhone (the 2G one in 2007) running iPhone OS 1.0. Even more impessively, my Mac Pro’s OS install and user data has been upgraded progressively from Mac OS X 10.2.8 on a PowerBook G4 all the way to Mac OS X 10.11 (the highest supported on that Mac Pro), which covered not only the 10.2->10.5 upgrades on the PowerBook, but then the shift to the Intel architecture on the Mac Pro (10.5 was a universal binary that ran on both!). So literally I’m running a user profile first configured in 2003. I have no idea where you get the idea that upgrades delete data. This is literally something where Apple excels head-and-shoulders above the rest.
We’ve got a ton of both types of machines (over 100 each). They’re about the same for TCO. Thing we find with windows is that it costs more in support and subscriptions whereas the initial capital is more for the macs. So over 3 years about the same. Failure rate of PCs is much higher (7% vs 2%) and we buy high end HP stuff only.
Thanks for the data. I’m sure the TCO differential varies wildly depending on industry and company size, too. (As well as, frankly, the skill of the sysadmins!)
You’ll find the office staff will take a PC if there is a choice and the power users and developers will take the macs. Honestly though the gap is closing thanks the WSL etc. WSL is closer to target environments than OSX.
I think office staff, being typically less tech-savvy (and thus less interested in changing their technology) and having typically used Windows for such tasks, is happy to stick with it (and why should they change?!?). And while MS Office for Mac has been around forever (literally longer than on Windows!), until recently it has not had total feature parity with Office for Windows, and the missing features tended to be business-oriented. So totally understandable.
WSL is interesting indeed.
You’d have to be mad to run Apple servers however. zero point in that.
Well, given that Apple doesnt even sell server hardware anymore... For sure there are sound reasons for running a Mac OS X Server server in a corporate network with Macs, for a few things. But with Macs and PCs largely using the same protocols for everything now (mostly via the Mac learning all the MS protocols), there’s not much need for separate Mac servers anymore.
[Edit: fixed nested formatting errors.]
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