Why Everyone Loves Apple 770
realtorperson writes "Why, at least the Apple users, love Apple? According to a recent article, the pure and simple reason is customer service and overall experience. The author writes, 'When Apple competitors are focused on cost reduction to increase profitability, Apple is investing resources to enhance its relationship with its customers. To me, that's impressive. Unfortunately, there are too many companies in the market that could care less about their customers, but Apple is determined and committed in delivering the experience and not just the product.
It's regrettably amusing that Apple competitors are working hastily to develop iPod clones to reap in success, but what many of them fail to comprehend is that it's not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service.'"
Spelling error (Score:5, Insightful)
it's so simple (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope, Apple must have some special secret. And all it'll take for some other company to pull the rug out from under them is to find that magic bullet, that one key aspect of their success, and then an iPod killer can truly be born.
Dammit, some people are stupid.
Tripe (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple's success clearly lies in marketing its products, which is what Steve Jobs is good at; this covers not only creating a buzz at media events or seeding the iPod so that it is "cool," but to give clueless journalists who write articles which are featured on slashdot the impression that they offer some magically better quality of service.
Interesting statement (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I'm rather worried about those that couldn't.
Apple loves their customers cash. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is a corporation, it is not Steve Jobs, it is not warm and cuddly. If Apple loved their customers then Apple would not charge such a premium for their systems. The fact is, Apple loves to exploit, and rightfully so, their position with their customers. They have worked long and hard to create their image and they sure as hell ain't going to let the profit it generates slip by.
For the love of God... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please allow me to utter a short yelp of annoyance.
Why Everyone Loves Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Like you said, the customers service is nothing special, and arguably worse than companies like Dell, which operate in a market with more severe competition (the windows PC).
The Apple II was pretty cool, but the 25 years of unjustified media hype and the attitude of Mac fanatics have really spoiled the Apple brand for me
Customer Service was out to lunch (Score:4, Insightful)
"Love me, love my console..." (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, that's easy: many people lack self-esteem and don't want to be ridiculed for the choices they make. It applies to everything -- editors (vi! emacs!), desktop environments (kde! gnome!), operating systems (Windows! Mac OS! Unix! Linux!), consoles (Sony! Microsoft! Nintendo!), politics (Fill in your own damn names!), you name it. If there are two or more choices, sooner or later an argument will break out about it.
Any challenge to any choice can be conflated into personal insult by the right (or rather, sufficiently wrong) person, requiring a response, usually visceral and insulting. And there's an even stranger response on the part of some designers, where they simultaneously insult a product for being clunky and hard to use at the same time as they're lifting UI elements for use in the version of the app that they're designing.
The only exception I can think of is U.S. mobile phone service. ("My service sucks more." "No, I have worse coverage." "Maybe, but at least you don't have as many dropped calls as I do!" Etc.)
Taking a step back. (Score:1, Insightful)
Not that perception isn't an important thing. I mean people seem satisfied with their Apple product, they don't mind the slight price premium. At least for their computer products, you have something akin to a luxury market (Jaguar, BMW for cars) where people not only buy a state of the art product but also an experience, a peace of mind, a fashion statement, a satisfaction guarantee, etc.
Anybody who try to compete head to head with Apple on price alone is bound to fail since that isn't their market. Now, today, it seems like a niche market, but I would be surprised if (at least in the computer industry, since it has probably already happened in numerous industries before) that is actually a growing market. I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years for now the "Quality of Experience" market takes a sizeable chunk of the overall computer market and able is had the head of this "revolution". It's been tried before in the computing industry (Gateway maybe) but Apple has the acumen to deliver that experience.
Another thing is that Apple sells you ways to do *new* things with your computer that are simple and powerful. Last time it was so apparent was in the 80s where families were eager to enter into the personal computer bandwagon. It seems to be repeating now.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:3, Insightful)
That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)
When I plug in an iPod that is not the one that is usually synced with iTunes, it would be trivial for Apple to offer a "Add these files to your itunes collection" option.
But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition, we cannot simply say "well, the company is doing what is in its own interests and we should support that" whenever we see otherwise good companies making deals with those that work to screw us.
Exactly - it is about customer service (Score:4, Insightful)
That's right - sync to the library on my computer! I'll bet this exceeds the 80/20 rule, but let's stick to that - if more than 20% of iPod users ever plug their iPod into more than one computer, I'll eat my iPod.
As for hiding the music directory on the iPod, what do novice users do all the time? clean up files! So I don't blame Apple from hiding the music files on the iPod either. I can't tell you how many windows and Mac computers both I have had to fix over the years from users who didn't know what they were doing, but just had to "tidy up"....
And if you do plug your iPod into a new computer, iTunes prompts you as to what to do, and warns you that if you sync it will wipe out all the existing music on your iPod. Heck, my mother figured it out when she plugged her iPod into my laptop so I could copy some files off of it.
So stop spreading the FUD... if Apple really cared about the "interests of large corporations" they would have gone to greater effort to prevent you from copying music files off than just hiding the directory
Unless you are trolling on slashdot
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't think for a moment that this isn't specifically designed to cultivate a fear of plugging your iPod into someone else's computer. After all, if people share music, Apple can't take a cut of the transaction.
I Disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a 3rd generation Ipod, my sister has 4th gen, and my dad has a nano. Neither one of us had any contact with Apple's customer service. The reason we haven't, is because there was no reason to; the ipods work flawlessly. It's because of the Product, that I like Apple. I bought an Ipod because I wanted a good mp3 player, not because I wanted to talk to friendly customer support.
Exactly, thank you (Score:3, Insightful)
What Apple has is amazing and is not easy to get. Its not just a matter of projecting the image of being a hip company that is keen to the alternative way of thinking. Even if you mean it, that's not enough. You have to be consistent, put up with a lot of shit for a long time until you finally win. Especially since the majority of people really just care about price over their own principles.
What Apple has is rare and amazing. Truly loyal customers.
That meay be true in US but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the product but the retailers (in EU) have to learn that this is not the way to keep me coming. For what it's worth, I just ordered the damn drive myself online for significantly less and will end up installing it myself. I hope an Apple (EU) rep will read this thread and get the message. This is the last time I am fixing it myself. I am perfectly happy to switch back to *nix systems that I service myself, if the supposed convenience of Apple fails me, I will.
Re:Best customer service (Score:2, Insightful)
People like the *idea* of Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple is smart enough to be that club's totem. They have managed to get people to invest their desire to be smugly superior in a product and in Apple's products at that.
There are no flaming fanboys who defend, say, Wusthoff kitchen knives, regardless of the quality of those tools. Clearly, Apple has managed to insinuate itself in people's need to think themselves smarter than others in a way that other sold at a preimum products haven't.
This makes them largely immune to network effects: They can have 3% of the market (or whatever) and not find themselves made irrelevant by their competitor's 95% share. In a "rational" calculation, you would be a fool to ensure that your version of most consumer software products will be thrown together as an afterthought, after the larger market had been satisfied. Or built for your platform without the benefit of economies of scale. By exploiting people's needs to think themselves smarter than the herd, Apple has turned this drawback into an advantage.
Re:Apple is in the image and style biz. (Score:2, Insightful)
You make good points about "the coolness factor", which personally I find a turn-off. I couldn't care less if a young, hip latte-swilling kid thinks my laptop is "cool". What I do care about is stability, ease of use, flexibility of configuration, and ease of maintainence. Apple holds what? Something like 4 or 5% of the market share in the PC world? They have to aggressively sell their product in order to compete. Sex sells, so they advertise their product as sexy and hip.
You might buy your first Mac because of the "cool" factor. But if and when you buy a second Mac, it will be because of the machine's stability and performance - it is a good product.
Not only are the dev tools free, but they are good too! The XCode IDE around gcc is very nice.
Cheers!
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thank you!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes I'm using hyperbole here but open source does not magically 'fix' all of our problems. I still regularly struggle with getting relatively simple things in linux to do what I want when I want without having to resort to google searches to find the right path to getting it fixed.
And if you have to compile the code yourself because it's all source code.. well better hope you don't miss something in the instructions and do something out of order.
Apple does what it sets out to do. Make is so that you don't have to compile, you don't have to set options and the 90% of users who do things and want to do things the way Apple has use cased it can. Period.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. Just the sort of know-nothingness that Apple (and MS) depend on to keep you in their thrall.
If you wanna know how it works and how to get it to do what you want, well, you gotta learn how it works. You must look behind the public mask, grasshopper, and see the reality throuth the lens of the CLI. You must learn to call things by their True Names, which can't be spoken by the mouse.
Not to mix a metaphor or anything
Quality, not Customer Service (Score:3, Insightful)
Customer service is the most overused and useless metric in business. Frankly because everyone says it's the most important aspect. Newsflash: it's B.S.
Quality of product is the most important. Quality ( another overzealously used term used without regard to what it really means ) is extremely important. Quality craftsmanship, quality in design, quality in user experience, etc. Quality != customer service or higher cost. It also doesn't mean you make the best product possible, but you make YOUR product as well as you can possibly make it. You have to demand it of yourself.
Apple does NOT, in fact, make their own products (read the box, designed by Apple, made in China/Indonesia/Korea), but they do produce a certain amount of quality in design, and do strive to produce quality in craftsmanship (note the continued push for longer battery life, in-house redesign of the click wheel, brighter displays). Out-of-the-box, I believe a new user will have a good experience with a Mac and its OS and therefore the quality of user experience is good as well. Add these factors up, and you get a significant amount of quality product. Yes, there are constraints (iTunes has to comply with DRM, the RIAA, FCC, et al.), but you can still provide quality... you just have to know how. That, in reality, is what most manufacturers and designers just don't get: quality is a sum product of a lot of hard work ON THE PRODUCT ITSELF not the PRODUCTION OF A PRODUCT. People will buy quality products at a higher price, but only if they know it's going to a quality product. That's where sales/marketing and business collide. There IS a difference between market-speak and business-speak. I wish people would stop using such crappy crosstalk.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)
Reality check - Apple has fought the RIAA pretty hard to keep iTMS prices 1)lower, and 2) uniform.
We all go round to the drummer's house to have a jam, we all have our ipods with us. Now - we should be able to pool all our music together. But try doing it using iTunes - its on the verge of impossible (in fact most ipod owners are afraid to plug their ipod in to someone's computer in case all the files are delete)
I can't help it you and your friends 1) don't know how to use an iPod, and 2) are incapable of using flash drives, which are specifically made for that sort of thing. You *can* use the iPod as a drive. However, it's not the default mode because - *gasp* - the iPod is a music player!
If you're trying to use a device for a use that isn't its reason for existance, be prepared to do some legwork to figure out how to make it do what you want. An iPod isn't a replacement for a recording studio.
Ironically, Apple makes a great product intended *just for you.* It's called GarageBand. Get a laptop.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:3, Insightful)
There wouldnt even BE iPods and iTunes if they didnt satisfy their corporate partners well enough. I applaud Jobs for getting much of the music industry to agree to distribute songs one-by-one digitally. If he had to have some strings attached to make it happen, so be it. If he hadnt, none of this would exist.
And now that it does, it may be up to new start-ups, hackers, and law suits (like in France) to make it less DRM-encumbered and more accessible.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Executive summary: RIAA bad, Apple in bed with RIAA for business purposes, best chance of RIAA extracting stick from ass is iTMS/Fairplay model.
Why do people keep playing this same sorry tune over and over again? First off , get it straight, it's the record companies, not the RIAA. Without the record companies "playing ball", Apple would most likely still have the #1 selling digital music player, but not the #1 online music store. The success of the iPod has almost nothing to do with the iTMS, and without licensing from the labels, Apple would still have the "seamless integration" of the iPod/iTunes.
And also, the whole "business model" of the iTMS isn't revolutionary at all. People keep making such a big fucking deal about how it's soooooo cutting edge and innovative just because it's the first truly successful online music store, but in reality it's the exact same business model that the recording industry has been using forever: X amount of money to record company to split up as it chooses, generally keeping most for itself and giving a pittance to the person or persons who actually created the music, and Y amount of markup to the retailer (Apple) to cover overhead (storage, software development, bandwidth, credit card fees etc.) and maybe make a little bit of profit. At best what Apple has done is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The iTMS is nothing more than Amazon without any physical product.
Executive Summary:
1) Apple has no relationship with the RIAA, so will you idiots please stop saying that, Apple is in bed with the record companies, which is NOT the same thing
2) Apple derives little to no benefit from their business relationship with the record companies
3) The best chance of further entrenching and extending the current music industry model in the online world is the iTMS/Fairplay model.
Re:"Could care less" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't think for a moment that this isn't specifically designed to cultivate a fear of plugging your iPod into someone else's computer. After all, if people share music, Apple can't take a cut of the transaction. the RIAA will stop letting Apple run the iTMS, and we're back to where we started - having to buy entire albums to get one good track.
I agree with you, they're trying to encourage people to not copy their friends' music libraries. And yes, there are cases - the garage band with personal noodling tracks that GP mentioned - where this is completely legal. However, the vast majority of cases are people copying tracks that they don't have distribution rights for. I think it's better to slightly inconvenience the few people (and it is slight - you can copy the tracks in the Terminal, using a shell script, using Automator, using freeware utilities, etc.) in order to make the appearance of compliance to the RIAA.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:2, Insightful)
3 bash / 1 perl script/ and 10 hours later (all automated I did it while at work)
I had all of the ipod music moved into folders based upon artist / album
and converted it out of the DRM format.
DRM, and the RIAA, only hurts the ones that they are trying to protect.
It didn't hurt me because I am able to get around it, and use 3rd party tools.
But damn, cmmon give the users what they want.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm an audio engineer - I've got a few dozen tracks on my iPod that I recorded and engineered, and yes, I hold distribution rights for 'em. However, I've also got 8 thousand other tracks that I don't hold distribution rights for. Many of my non-engineer friends have thousands of tracks to which they don't have distribution rights for. Should the iPod have an ability that I can use legally on less than 1% of my tracks and my friends can't use legally at all? Or should we just realize that there are alternate (and better) tools for legally sharing music - burning a CD, using the iPod in disk mode, etc.?
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why people really love Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Idiot - that was the store (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, Apple owned their own store on Regent Street [apple.com], as do they every single one of their other stores (not even through a subsidary), so that had very much to do with Apple. That said, this kind of customer service - including transferring stuff over to the new box - shouldn't be surprising, and I think it's sad that it is. I know of only one local chain that would help out with stuff like that, and they'd likely charge you for that hour and not even know what to do with the Mac in the first place (even though they sell them).
Fluff (Score:3, Insightful)
I call bullshit. Of course the iPod is what people love about apple these days. iPods make up about as much of Apple's revenue as its computer sales. The other driving force is the fact that an Apple computer running OS X and Apple applications is a rock solid system, with tremendous capabilities right out of the box, and a great user experience. Do not confuse user experience with customer experience - they are not the same thing. I myself love apple, own a powerbook and an ipod, will continue to buy from them, and think their customer service is indeed top notch. However, I wouldn't in a million years claim that it is the customer service that drew me to them. People do not care a lot about customer service when they are spending money, otherwise no U.S. cable service or cellular phone provider would still be in business.
The author may have hit nearer the mark by saying "Apple is investing resources to enhance its relationship with its customers." I interpreted that as brand promotion, integrated services like
Re:Thank you!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Best customer service (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
No, for me, the best thing about Apple is that they remain committed to R&D. They're coming out with new ideas all the time. Sure, some of them inevitably flop, but they don't just sit around and copy what other companies are doing. They also keep their development teams fairly small and don't put out a lot of bloatware. They keep their GUI simple and accessible, yet leave the door open for tinkerers.
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is trivial. This is a no-brainer. But here we are, on a site for NERDS, and people can't grasp this basic idea.
Reliability? (Score:2, Insightful)
At least we had class actions to help with new Ipod batteries and burned out Powerbook main boards.
Re: Why Everyone Loves Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How I Hate Corporate Fanboys (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not claiming that Apple doens't care about money, so you're right to point out that this is a motivating factor, as it is with any corporation. But you should do a little research into Jobs' many public statements, over 3 decades now, before being complacent with "it's a black or white" kind of answer. I've been using Apple products for 20 years now, and while I'm not blind to the megalomania of Jobs and the many boneheaded moves he and the company have made, that same megalomania and driven quality is behind a long-term obsession with user experience. That focus shows in the industrial design they're famous for (rightly, imho), and you either love that or hate it. But Jobs has said, repeatedly, that "Apple's DNA is to be found at the intersection of art and technology."
It's not the only way to do things, but it's their way and they ought to be judged on the whole approach, not your rather uniformed and biased assumptions.
Re:For the love of God... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Most Americans can't be bothered with learning the English language. They consistently justify it with statements like "Oh, you know what I meant!"
Re:Best customer service (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody likes the RIAA, except for the record labels. I doubt even the people who work at Apple like them, or like having to basically cripple their hardware and software because of them. But it just doesn't make any sense, if you wanted to produce a useful product -- and useful requires that you not get sued and get an injunction placed against distributing the product, or get run out of business by billion-dollar DMCA lawsuits, groundless as they may be -- you don't go taking a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is the RIAA.
Instead, you blow some smoke at them. Appease them, if you will. You throw some trivial copy protection on there, enough so you can say "hey, we told them not to steal music," but which makes it easy for anybody with half a brain to download Senuti (or any of the other dozen utilities that are out there) and share their music with anyone else.
It's a good compromise, and I much prefer it to the alternative, which is that they wait for the RIAA to either sue them into the ground, or use their pet politicians to pass some bullshit law requiring really onerous DRM. Because that's the alternative.
Re:For the love of God... (Score:1, Insightful)
Just unpopular. It's the only rule most English obsessives know and there is no basis for it.
Re:Best customer service (Score:4, Insightful)
If Apple always "pretends to be a caring, loving company", does it matter if they are genuine or "only pretending"? Either way, the customers get good service.
Re:Best customer service (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How I Hate Corporate Fanboys (Score:3, Insightful)
The best way to shovel money into the shareholders' pockets is to make the customer so happy with the product that they have no reason to go elsewhere. Apple has done a great job with that. That the customer ends up so happy with the product is admittedly a side effect of the business model, but it's not to be ignored.
PLEASE get it out of your thick skull that wearing a corporate logo of ANY sort is cool - it isn't because it just goes to show the rest of the world that you are insecure enough to want to belong to one (or more) exclusive little cliques that makes you feel special because you can look down on those that aren't members of those same cliques.
Like the clique you're currently flying the flag of? The Clique Of People Who Are So Smart And Great Because They Realized That Corporations Want Money And You Didn't?
don't just buy something because it's made by "Gap" or "Apple" because then you really are showing the rest of the world only how much of a corporate puppet you really are...
If I've bought 9 products from "Apple" in the past and have been extremely satisfied with all of them, there's no reason for me to believe that buying product #10 will be any different an experience for me. That's a completely legitimate reason to give Apple's products preference when I'm in the market -- they've EARNED it.
Fuck worrying about whether you're a "corporate puppet". Just buy what you like.
For every complex question... (Score:3, Insightful)
(H. L. Mencken, paraphrased.)
I think there's more to it than great products or R&D to improve the customer experience, although those are certainly major factors. I think there's a bunch of mutually reinforcing components to the Apple Cult, all of which certainly benefit from product quality and customer service, but which separate Apple from other companies that produce great products (e.g. Gillette, Disney, BMW).
One issue is sunken cost. If you pay a lot for something -- anything, unless it totally sucks, you tend to cleave to it. (I may love Gillette Razors, but when I run out of blades there's nothing stopping me from trying Schick.)
Another is mutual exclusiveness (which ties into sunken cost). By choosing product A, getting familiar with product A, and buying things that are compatible with product A, you make switching to product B far more difficult. (If I drive a BMW there's no real financial reason not to switch to Acura for my next car. It's not like I was planning to move the leather seats and stereo from my BMW into my new Acura.)
Another is self-image. Apple is very good at projecting itself as a cool, individualistic, creative company that produces products for cool, individualistic, creative people. Microsoft tries desperately to create this image for itself (look at ANY of its mainstream TV ads for the last ten years) and fails to achieve this. Plenty of computers appear in TV shows and movies as product placement, but Macs appear in TV shows (e.g. Seinfeld, Buffy, etc.) because the folks making the shows use them. (In both examples, Apple actually paid or provided new computers to the shows to put current models in.) Here's a rough guide: if the folks in a TV Show or an ad are using your product and the logo is taped over, it's not paid product placement. If you see a website screenshot in an ad, it's probably in Safari and showing Aqua widgets. If you see a computer in a furniture ad, it's usually a Mac. (Heck many websites are essentially ads for Aqua. Look, we're desperately trying to look as cool as Apple
There's always self-presentation too. Since Apple products are expensive and stylish they're great conspicuous consumption -- especially when a MacBook Pro is cheaper than a couple of Louis Vuitton purses, looks better (in my opinion), lasts longer, and gets more use. (How many of us can afford the *clothes* -- or *shoes* -- in Sex in the City? I owned Carrie's laptop though.)
Apple also manages -- and this is a neat trick -- to always be the underdog. (At least post IBM PC.) Even when it dominates a market (as with iPod and iTunes) it somehow manages to be the "in thing" and simultaneously the underdog. (Thank you French courts, thank you constant idiotic remarks from Microsoft, thank you Apple Records, thank you Wall Street doomsayers.)
Apple has always had a lot of geek cred too. Sure, semi-technical folks (the kind of people who consider hacking an AUTOEXEC.BAT file or using RegEdit makes them an elite hacker) prefer PCs, but uber-geeks have almost always preferred Macs (at least to PCs, if not Suns or Lisp Machines). Part of this probably stems -- ironically -- from Macs being harder to develop for than PCs. (At least until RealBasic came out.)
Re:Hence the HUGE Marketshare (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is there so much ado about market share? How much market share does BMW or Mercedes Benz have? How about Jaguar etc.? Apple is a huge company and is making more profits that the Dells of this world. I just had an iPod die after about ten months. I was told that they would send me a new one and I should return the dead one. I had a brand new one delivered to me in two days. I put the dead one in the supplied return envelope and had no costs whatsoever. That is pretty fast, considering that we live in a rural area. I have been using Apple products since the Mac-Plus in 1985 and this the first time I had a warranty claim or an Apple product die. We still have a color-classic Mac sitting in the corner, that runs 24/7 since 1995 as an answering/fax machine and X-10 programmer/controller. Apple is not perfect, but they get a lot right and therefore have loyal, repeat customers.
Re:Spelling error (Score:3, Insightful)
No, this is why people *don't* like Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't be shocked when you get a bunch of different answers. Different people do things for different reasons...successful companies are the ones that provide a lot of good reasons (not just one) to buy their product.