szegedixy

Mike Wuerthele said:

brynpttrsn said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

The CBC put a lot of weight on the Apple support forums as a venue for data. However, Apple in no way participates in the forums, nor issues any form of formal statement regarding data recovery there.

True or false:
Moderators on the Apple support forums are employed by Apple.
Thread pulled directly from support forum here. There's also evidence Rossmann provided in the video that was linked in the article that suggests that the Apple employed forum admins make upwards of $95,000 a year specifically to oversee the support forums.

Even if there are volunteer moderators, whichever way you look at it, the forums are still owned and the posts are moderated at the very least indirectly by Apple. Selective censorship is one thing... but to delete all comments that say data is recoverable by third party and to leave comments that literally say "phone is garbage data gone forever." is absolutely actively intentionally lying to the customer.

A step even further to say that any third party service claiming that the data can be recovered is a scam is deceiving and disrespectful to the customer. The threads are clearly being read, moderated, edited, and deleted over claims of "questionable advice" by the moderators.

So my question here is: How is "Data is gone forever. Throw your phone away." not questionable advice? I think it might be slightly questionable... no?

Mike Wuerthele said:

A typical 'water damage' response from Apple's forums

The pictured thread had nothing to do with data recovery. The phone booted and a speaker was damaged. Third party was advised to fix speaker. Please find a thread that does the same for data recovery purposes which is the main point of discussion here. Ive only found one through my own search. More commonly there are quite a few that just have "no" as a response...

The only part of your editorial that actually pertains to the CBC story is:

Mike Wuerthele said:

Another failure of Apple's is banning Jones from the support forums. While Jones said that she read the terms of service and says that she did nothing wrong —a point that we believe —we feel that they made a bad call in that regard, as it pertains to customer education.

And you agree that Apple failed......

Besides that... the CBC story didn't say that Apple should perform board level repairs. It just stated that Apple shouldn't lie to customers which it clearly does since multiple sources have confirmed a hard "NO" answer on data recovery.

TLDR;

Mike Wuerthele said:

Apple has no policy to tell customers that there is no hope for lost data.

Mike Wuerthele said:

We don't doubt that the CBC was told by Apple that the data wasn't recoverable. Like before, Apple's representative did the job in accordance with training, followed the procedure the way they were supposed to, and performed at the level of experience they were expected to have.

"True or false:
Moderators on the Apple support forums are employed by Apple."

Both. There are a few moderators employed by Apple, in the single-digits. 95%+ of the moderators are not employed by Apple, and it's probably 98% plus. The tech suggestions for fixes like "throw your phone away" that you cited here are given by the users, who are not employees of Apple. Do you really think that Apple is paying $100K and up a year for hundreds of moderators?

And again, while this latest video is about data recovery, and Apple's forums, this article as a whole is about the CBC's issues with reporting on Apple service. Also again, there is more than enough evidence that says that Apple does send users for third-party repairs and has no policy against doing so -- see post 38 in this thread from Mrs. Jones about that, where she says that she gets them.

It would have taken CBC five minutes to go into an Apple store and get a Drive Savers referral, with a discount.