Why Everyone Loves Apple

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

It's spelt A S T R O T U R F.

Re:Spelling error

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing [wikipedia.org]

Re:Spelling error

Kharma whoring. [wikipedia.org]

I keed, I keed.

Re:"Could care less"

As far as I can tell, it's a braindead Americanism, because in Britain, we always use the logical "I couldn't care less".

Nope. I've heard Brits get it wrong, too. It has more to do with education than nationality.

-jcr

Best customer service

I recently had to take my Intel Mac Mini back to the London Regent Street store after a problem booting up. Unfortunately it was one day after the 14-day refund and replace guarantee had expired. They said, 'oh well, 15 days is close enough', and they replaced it there and then on the spot, and transferred all my data on to the new machine on the same day. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that with any other company ever.

Re:Best customer service

You sound rather narrow-eyed and guilty. Even if you have a twelth month guarentee by law, you do not have the right to get a new machine on the spot, let alone does anybody have to copy your data over to the new machine.

Re:Best customer service

This is Apple pretending to be a caring, loving company (like they always do) and you fell for it.

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:Idiot - that was the store

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).

it's so simple

Yeah, cause it couldn't be a combination of a lot of things, including solid hardware, a useful interface/software, thoughtful design, good marketing, adequate customer service, and having the right product at the right time...it couldn't simply be that complex.

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.

Re: Why Everyone Loves Apple

the attitude of Mac fanatics have really spoiled the Apple brand for me

I know what you're saying. Like, other people's relentless urge to drink water and eat food has driven me to ... ack!

Apple is in the image and style biz.

Buy Apple and you'll look and be cool!

Don't believe me? Why is that people were actually wearing just the ear buds when the iPod was becoming popular? Image. During the switch campaign, all of the folks that I saw in the adds were the all blck wearing, pierced noses, and other younger folks who looked really cool. I didn't see any folks in business suits talking about ROI or how it made their organization much more profitable - like you see in IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc... ads.

Is Apple really that much better than any other computer out there? I haven't seen any compelling evidence for that. I would agree that as recent as the mid-90's, Apple was superior, but now, I don't see it. Prove me wrong - please. I have to say that Apples are much nicer looking than anything out there. And I think Jobs knows this. Jobs is a genius when it comes to marketing. He made a brilliant move with the "flavor" iMacs years ago. I thought those machines were crap to use - it was slow and OS 9 crashed and hung a lot. OS X works much better on them, but it's still slow. But they sure looked great!

I haven't tried the new machines, yet. I'm not in the market for a new machine, but when I am, beleive me, I will look at Apple again. I do like the fact that all of the dev tools are free! Unlike the other OS company.

Re:Tripe

This article is simple shilling for Apple. Anyone who has actually had an encounter with Apple's customer service would know that they're exactly the same as any other manufacturer.

My experiences have been different.

A few weeks ago I needed to order a battery for my wife's laptop, a slightly older Powerbook. I had ordered one from their website, but it was the wrong one, so I called them to replace it. Well, they had a hard time figuring out which battery I needed, and so after being put on hold for 15 minutes I hung up with the intention of calling them back the next Monday (this was on a Saturday.)

Well, about 10 minutes later they called me back to tell me my battery was on its way. FedEx delivered it that coming *Monday*. I have never had a company call me back, and I think that ranks right up there with the best customer services experiences I have ever had.

Re:Tripe

That's nothing new for me. Shortly after I got my iMac, I got a call asking if everything worked as expected and if I was happy with my purchase. Of course, I said yes, I was happy with it. Then one evening a few days later, I got another call asking if they had included all the cables in the package and if my iMac still worked OK. At first, I was flattered by this hands on customer care, but then the calls started coming every day while I was at work or late at night, sometimes three or four times a day. Was I still satisfied? Had I been looking at other brands lately? Did I think the hard drive was getting fat? I ended up selling it because it was just too high maintenance. If you're reading this, Apple, it's not you, it's me. And quit calling my friends trying to get my new number.

Apple loves their customers cash.

If you have a problem with one of their systems or an iPod (like I did) you can damn well forget it unless the problem becomes widespread enough to hit popular tech pages.

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.

Apple's service is not that great.

I have two dead iPods and a dead iBook to show for my experiment with Apple. One died just out of warranty, the replacement I bought had the drive go with less than a month left on the warranty. The replacement came, and turns out had a bad dock connector. Unfortunately they wouldn't honor a warranty on the replacement and in the two remaining weeks of the warranty, I didn't happen to use the replacement. So now I've got two dead iPods.

I also have a iBook that died with the extremely common logic board failure two months out of warranty... a problem that they extended the warranty coverage for on the G3 iBooks, but didn't do on the G4 even though its a very common problem.

Apple was the reason I left ten years of Linux use as my primary desktop OS behind, and Apple is the reason I'll be going back.

Re:Language nazi

Why is this so hard for people to get right?

Because they could care less.

For the love of God...

... the phrase is 'could NOT care less'. If you COULD care less, that means you do care and have room for treating your customers worse, doesn't it?

Please allow me to utter a short yelp of annoyance.

Re:For the love of God...

I'm with you... Is it a US thing to always say it wrong?

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!"

Absolutely True

This is absolutely true. I've bought many macintosh computers for the companies I have owned and worked for.

During lean times we would use eBay to buy computers and equipment for employees. One occasion in particular I bought a strawberry iMac as a work station for a designer advertised as new in the box only to find out the machine was two years past the date of manufacture. As a matter of policy, Apple only honors the warranty within I believe 90 days of the date of manufacture. After a few attempts to repair the machine unsuccessfully, Apple replace it with a new (at the time) iMac that had much better specifications at no charge. Just recently, they gave me a lot of good advice and support on a lemon iMac I received from MacMall.

I value customer service primarily because I pride myself on giving it - and it's nice to deal with a company then genuinely seems to care about it's customers. I'm an Apple customer for life partially because I prefer their product, but mostly because they treat me like a human being instead of a credit card number.

Customers Service at Apple is awful!

I had a problem with a recent iTunes patch, long story short it broke all DRM-ed music playback on my PC but not on the iPod. Tried all the standard bits, uninstall, reinstall, looked up help page...

Sure Apple did have a help page for the problem but it didn't help one tiny bit.

So I contacted them. Said something like "DRM protection music is distorted during playback as suggested by an apple help page(URL); MP3, WMA, and CD Audio playback works just fine ..." and they sent back a cookie cutter "You can't convert to WMA" ...

This is just yet another company that doesn't give too hoots enough to read what you send them or to respond on their forums. The article is talking a whole load of bull from my experiences with apple up to this point.

If you ask me, the company with the single best customer service is Amzon(.co.uk). They don't bull you... They are MORE than fair, and don't make you jump though hoops.

Customer Service was out to lunch

So when Apple initially refused to acknowledge that their new iPod Nanos would scratch easily, where exactly was good customer service being practised?

Why? It's simple:

Apple's Steve throws frisbees, not chairs.

Re:complete tripe

Most Apple customers never even deal with Apple customer service.

Which is, of course, the best service of all.

Apple pays very close attention to the issues that drive their support calls, and they get prioritized accordingly. The MagSafe power connector, for example, was developed because Apple knows exactly how many times they've fixed a machine because their users have damaged a laptop by snagging the power cable and dragging it off a table.

-jcr

Trademark

Gee, I was confused, I thought you were talking about Apple records!

That meay be true in US but..

Having just called the local Apple Center in my town to ask about a Superdrive replacement to my MacMini all I got was "that will cost 500-600 Euro", appalled I replied that I would be better off buying a new one, the reply "that's the way we like it"... some service buddy...

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.

People like the *idea* of Apple

It is also, in large measure because people want to be part of an aesthetic elite. They want to be smarter than the masses. They want to belong to a club.

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.