retrogusto

This does look like it would be a step in the right direction, but for it to be worth using, companies are going to have to get a lot better at the chatting thing. In my experience, it takes a ridiculously long time to answer a simple question or solve a simple problem via customer support chat—companies are very slow to respond to your messages, but if you don’t respond to their messages within a minute or so, they disconnect you. As a result, it requires your full attention for long stretches of time, as they ask you various irrelevant questions and require you to rephrase things until they understand. But if they already know who you are and can let you respond to them at your own convenience like a normal text message, that would already be a big improvement. 

bloggerblog said:

AppleTV's new YouTube app is awful, and its laggy UI is nauseating.

I agree 100%. I can’t imagine what they were thinking. It been driving me nuts, although the upside is that I’ve been much less inclined to watch clips on YouTube, which is probably just as well, I suppose. 

After a 31-minute call with Apple just to confirm that they would replace my battery for $29 at my scheduled Genius Bar appointment, three separate trips to the nearest Apple store in terrible weather (20 minutes each way, so a total of two hours trudging through snow and icy New York sidewalks) and a total of more than an hour and forty minutes in the store talking to various store reps and standing around the store (because they were busy and running way behind schedule—and this doesn’t count the three hours that I waited without my phone while they were supposed to be working on it), the store informed me that they wouldn’t replace my iPhone battery after all because the water indicator was red, the result of a brief fresh-water mishap 18 months ago that left no other discernible trace. They couldn’t explain why this was a dealbreaker. Then they warned me not to have anyone else do it, because it would make my phone ineligible for future Apple Store repairs. 

So I pointed out to the guy that I had little to lose, since they wouldn’t even replace my battery for money, and I replaced the damn thing myself with a battery from iFixit. 

In theory, it seems nice to have Apple do it, but it’s also good to have options. 

Horace Dediu recently said that he only expects iPhone ASPs to go up by about $10 in the coming year, but if they are really selling more 8 Plus than 8, and also a fair number of the X, it seems like the ASP could really go up a lot more. 

Odd that it took so long for this, given that Fox owns 30% of Hulu.