swineone

WTH said:

Last month I took my iPhone to the Genius Bar to replace a dying battery.  In the process of replacing the battery, the tech damaged the logic board.

I walked out of the Apple Store with a brand new iPhone for the price of a battery replacement.

Mike Wuerthele said:

swineone said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

swineone said:

williamlondon said:

swineone said:

williamlondon said:

swineone said:

The average Apple tech is much less knowledgeable and skilled than quite a few independent technicianS. I would trust e.g. Louis Rossmann with my hardware over ANY Apple technician. I mean ANY. There is no technician working at Apple that could do their job as well as Louis does. BTW: I’m an electrical engineer, I design portable electronic devices, and I’ve spent quite a few hours watching Louis’ videos. He displays impressive skills. And often he has to fix a crap job done by, guess who, Apple technicians.

Bullshit. And if he wants to become a certified repair person, I'm fine with that, but your other claims are pure bullshit.

BTW, anecdotes prove nothing

Nice argument you put there, “bullshit”. I’m fully convinced by this one magical word.

Screw the actual facts, such as that Louis Rossmann quite often fixes Macs deemed unfixable by Apple. And especially, how he performs fixes much more cheaply (never mind environmentally friendly) than Apple by replacing the few targeted components that actually failed rather than whole boards at a time as the Apple technicians do — indeed, if his fixes weren’t cheaper than Apple’s, who would be crazy to hire him rather than Apple fix their devices?

Plus, he does all of these things without proper access to repair documentation and knowledge bases, and most importantly, to the parts he needs. For those who don’t know: Apple has the awful habit of calling up an IC manufacturer and throwing their weight around to require the manufacturer to create a small variation of an existing part, with a trivial and technically unnecessary change such as swapping a couple of pins around. Then Apple won’t let the manufacturer sell the same part to anyone else but Apple or provide documentation on it. Thus, repair technicians can’t get ahold of it, and must take these parts from donor boards. This is simply the most actively user-hostile move by a company that I’ve ever seen in my life. It truly sickens me every time I think of it, especially when you consider all the (lying) marketing strategy from Apple trying to paint it as a nice, friendly company that just wants to help its customers and the environment. This one example brings all that illusion down.

Anecdotes, like exceptions, prove nothing. One man is NOT better than *ANY* Apple technician. Your argument is so ridiculous, just stop.

Really? It’s impossible for one person to be better than the best in a given set of persons?

Let’s try this. Skill = playing tennis. Set of persons = { me, my wife }. One person = Roger Federer.

Your argument is that Roger Federer can’t possibly be better than me or my wife at tennis.

Now who has the ridiculous argument again?

Like you said, repair parts that are swapped out in the field are sent to the depot for refurbishment and return to the repair part supply stream, sometimes to assist the refurbished device stream that I am about to discuss.

Entire-device swaps at the store-level are also sent to a depot for repair and assessment. Whole-devices repaired at the depot in this fashion are sent to the service swap stock, or the refurb store.

This depot refurbishment is done at the component level, by humans with equal or better skill than Rossmann's. Some will be slightly less talented, and some will be slightly more.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Rossmann and others like him exist. But to say that Apple doesn't have anybody in the service stream that has his level of skill is false.

I do admit the point about Rossmann was made to shock those who somehow think the lack of Apple certification is an automatic sign of incompetence (though I'm sure he'd rank quite highly within Apple if he worked there).

Getting back to the point, though. How can the end user access these technicians so they'll, like Rossmann does, fix a fried voltage regulator for a couple hundred dollars, rather than over a thousand as Apple charges for say a logic board repair?

We can't? We have to pay full price (with markup, most likely) for a logic board from Apple which they'll turn around, refurbish and resell with even more markup?

Say I took a GM car to GM, out of warranty, to fix an issue which ultimately can be ascribed to a worn-out spark plug. GM tells me "we'll have to perform a full engine swap, and by the way, that'll be $5,000, please." Then GM turns around, replaces the spark plug (at a cost of a few dozens of dollars) and resells the engine for say $4,000. An engine which by the way probably costs $2,000 or $3,000 to make. Outraged by this, you thank GM and take this to your friendly neighborhood mechanic, and they tell you "sorry. I know it's just a worn-out spark plug, which by the way is quite similar to model XYZ1337 from NGK, but GM called up NGK and told them to use an english-unit screw thread rather than a metric-unit one for no good reason, and have an agreement in place that NGK is forbidden to sell the english-unit version. Maybe you can look for an identical car in the junkyard so we can take the spark plug out of it?"

I'm the last person in the world to demand the government step in. However, I can't help but rejoice when I see Apple being forced to do the right thing, as in this situation and also the most likely break up of the App Store 30% monopoly.

The analogy doesn't really work, because 1) A spark plug is a known consumable, like a battery in an iPhone.

And 2) We've spoken about Apple Store repair volumes at some length already. GM's annual repair volume is about 1/100's of Apple's. I'll summarize Apple's situation in a longer text here:

In the last five complete fiscal years, Apple has sold approximately 1.36 billion devices. It's hard to get solid data out of Apple regarding total failures, but the general consensus is that 4 percent of all installed devices on any platform, world-wide fail per year from forces outside of user abuse. This number does not include retirement or disposal, and can be as high as 10 times greater if you include user damage, or damage from disasters.

So, for the sake of this calculation in regards to conservatively estimating on the low-end how many devices need to be serviced per year per repair shop, if you conservatively assume that one in a hundred, not four in a hundred, of all Apple devices fail from reasons other than user-induced damage like a broken screen per annum, that leaves 13.6 million failures per year just from component age. Including user-induced damage like stoppage or spills, this grows to about 136 million devices per year -- about 26,000 per center, per year.

I'd like it if Apple did component-level repair in-store like I used to back in the day of the G4 tower and the like. I'd also like it if they did these kinds of repair in-store. But it's just not really feasible from a customer satisfaction standpoint when a motherboard diagnosis and repair is an hour or less with an on-the-spot replacement, and a component-level diagnosis and repair is not.

As a rule, AppleInsider readers have been around the block and understand that service is not immediate. Stand in line in a McDonalds even once, and you'll see how much patience folks have for waiting for anything. Again, Apple is doing what's right for nearly all of the existing user base -- just not for regular AppleInsider readers