Apple Promises 'White Glove Experiences' For Its Most Helpful Community Members (theverge.com) 32
Apple is rewarding the most active and helpful members of its support forums with its new Community Plus program. The invite-only program gives these "high-level" Support Community members access to exclusive perks and experiences. From a report: Apple's Support Community members can already earn points based on their activity, granting them access to rewards as they level up. This includes the ability to upload a custom avatar as well as participate in conference calls with the Apple Support Community team and even in-person meetups with other members. But the Community Plus program appears to take things a bit further. It applies to the "shining stars" of Apple support forums who provide the most detailed and helpful answers. Apple says it will only add a "small group" of people to the program on a yearly basis. If this type of program sounds familiar, you may remember that Microsoft has had its MVP (most valuable professional) award for over 20 years and has recognized over 4,000 MVPs so far -- at times rewarding them with trips, subscriptions that included free access to expensive software, and free training materials.
White Glove Experiences (Score:2)
I was under the impression with Apple that the 'White Glove Experience' is that the system 'just works'. I say put more into 'just works' and less into hand jobs for helpful people working for free.
Re: White Glove Experiences (Score:3)
The glove turns white after the fact.
Re:White Glove Experiences (Score:5, Funny)
I was under the impression with Apple that the 'White Glove Experience' is that the system 'just works'.
To me, the phrase sounds more like getting a prostate exam from Mickey Mouse.
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I for one applaud this move! I have been defending Apple in even the most indefensible cases. Storage speed halved on the new Macbook Pro? I was there to defend Apple. Bullshit "performance" graphs showing the results of "industry standard benchmarks"? I was there to defend Apple. I deserve my Apple white glove experience!
-NoMoreACs
I guess I have achieved Slashdot Royalty Status.
People are now forging Posts in my Username, LOL!!!
now bend over (Score:2)
What's wrong with it being sexy?
Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
They've found a way to legally pay support staff less than minimum wage
Re: (Score:3)
I never have mod points when I want them.
It seems more and more commercial vendors are hiding from their clients. Often the most helpful remark offered is that Company removed such and such feature last release. Which isn't adding anything to the conversation or answering with any meaningful solution to the problem encountered. Often users are mocked because they find the need for the removed feature.
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Re: Translation: (Score:2)
a lot of work for little in return (Score:4, Interesting)
There's always the "helpy-helpersons" out in forums, you know the ones like in the MSFT forums that say "Have you refreshed your Windows installation?" when you can't get a driver to install or a new device to be recognized.
It does take time, a lot of time and those who put in the hours actually trying to do customer support for Apple should get something better than a smile, a thank you and a hearty handclasp for saving them millions. (For those who don't know, that was from a WC Fields movie.) [youtube.com]
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It does take time, a lot of time and those who put in the hours actually trying to do customer support for Apple should get something better than a smile
Yes, like a paycheck.
For all the other over-paying schmucks (Score:2)
It's the latex glove experience.
Free Support Staff (Score:1)
Microsoft MVP model (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft *used* to have a program for MVPs. The idea was that those who contributed the most got the coveted rights to use the MVP badge and received invites and annual flights to Microsoft HQ to hang out with the developers of the relevant product for a day, get swag, etc. MVPs also got priority technical support directly from Microsoft product developers.
Then Microsoft decided that the MVP program was too much hassle and that the billions of dollars in sales that the MVPs had helped them make was capable of being self-sustaining without them. Over the years, the program was scaled back and now is pretty much dead. One Outlook MVP I spoke to about a decade ago basically said that Microsoft pretty much ignored all of the MVPs...and that was a decade ago. Outlook is still a disaster of a software product and I'm sure its core COM interface is just as broken under the hood today as it was a decade ago - I've just had the fortune of not having to write any COM addins for it in the interim. While the rest of the Office suite's COM interface works as expected, Outlook's COM interface is an unmitigated disaster that can't refcount properly.
My personal... (Score:3)
...experience with the Apple community forums has never been good. Seemingly 99% of the time people answer who either don't understand the question, or don't actually have a relevant answer (or any answer for that matter) if they do. I always search elsewhere for answers before I waste time wading through those practically useless forums. Annoyingly, that bloody forum is often the first one up in my search results, and without fail, clicking on the link leads me to an outdated, obsolete, or outright wrong answer. /endrant
There are much better places to seek answers than Apple's awful community bullshit forums.
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It doesn't help that Apple censors anything that goes against its own views (e.g. if its a post about hardware failures and data recovery then any answer other than "go buy a new device and accept that your data is gone" will be censored since Apple refuses to admit that data recovery is even possible in these situations)
re: Apple and censoring forums (Score:3)
It's always tough to prove it when it happens. But yes, historically, I remember a lot of complaints about Apple forum threads just suddenly vanishing without a trace, when they called out such things as hardware defects that weren't getting officially recognized by Apple as issues.
I think it's like many other situations though. If you really want good support and detailed information about a product, you need to find a 3rd. party message forum. (As another example that comes to mind? I own an Escort radar
Re: Apple and censoring forums (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, historically, I remember a lot of complaints about Apple forum threads just suddenly vanishing without a trace, when they called out such things as hardware defects that weren't getting officially recognized by Apple as issues.
They disappear their own documents without a trace when they're inconvenient too. Just try finding the one about B&W G3 data corruption on the ATA bus when using UDMA transfer modes. When they destroyed til.apple.com and folded the techinfo library into the knowledge base, older and newer TIL documents made it into the KB, but not that one.
Meanwhile Microsoft still has documents describing bugs in MS-DOS 5.0 online. Apple is literally less scrupulous about admitting its mistakes than Microsoft.
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Yet for some reason, a whole lot of legacy docs survive, like this one: https://support.apple.com/kb/TA21618?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US [apple.com]
I honestly don't thing Apple is doing it when it's "inconvenient" as such, they're just completely incompetent. I really should have moved off Mac OS X sooner than I did (last Mac I bought was in 2010).
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I honestly don't thing Apple is doing it when it's "inconvenient" as such, they're just completely incompetent.
I don't think it's an accident that they have that ancient doc you posted but don't have one of the docs that makes them look like spectacular assholes when they suggest that instead of a logic board replacement, you spend money to either buy FWB toolkit and degrade performance to a PIO mode, or on an Apple-tax-included ATA card which realistically meant $100+. (For literally the same card that you'd pay $20 for on a PC, but with different ROM.)
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Ah yes, the tax for a card with an Open Firmware boot ROM. The situation was similar with SCSI cards. Also affected Sun users. PCI card fit fine, but couldn't boot from it, and a card that would work cost way too much more just for a ROM swap.
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This is why ISA is the greatest bus of all time ;)
Srsly tho you could add ATA to your IBM PC/RT with a normal PC-compatible host adapter if you were running BSD
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That has nothing to do with ISA being great, it's just because the ATA boot code was in the system BIOS itself, not on the card. ISA (and VLB) SCSI cards needed boot ROMs on the card to be bootable on PCs (unless you wanted to use a boot floppy to just get far enough to get up and running from the SCSI disk).
Sun, IBM (for their PowerPC and AS/400 systems) and Apple went with requiring an Open Firmware boot ROM on the card, and the vendors realised they could charge a whole lot more for a card with such a R
Free labour (Score:3)
Beats paying them, I suppose.
Useless Forum (Score:1)
Apples forum is just as useless as Microsoft’s but for different reasons.
Apples forum is frequented by zealots who first want to criticise you for holding it wrong but don’t really have a clue.
Microsoft forums have paid script readers, who first empathise with your pain, then proceed to give completely unhelpful advice usually not related to the problem.
Stack exchange does much better Apple or MS.
Black Mirror (Score:2)
The idea of "exclusive experiences" as a gift from Apple gives me the creeps and scares me just a little bit.
Harvesting vital organs can be done with white glo (Score:2)
Means they'll pledge* to use lube before their plastic deformation of Uranus.
* In the theory-not-reality Amber Heard sense