2 iphone units in 16 months and 10 reasons why Apple sucks

Posted by acute accent – 8 May 2013

The facts:

I ordered an iphone 4S directly on Apple.com. 10 months later the unit stopped working; the phone would not start.
Booking an appointment at a Apple Store requires a bit of patience: the waiting time is of several days to one week. At my first visit my 10-month old unit was replaced by a new one.
6 months later the replacement unit stopped working
The replacement unit was diagnosed with a motherboard issue. The unit could not be recovered and it could not be repaired.

10 reasons why Apple sucks

The case raises a number of concerns about Apple’s customer service:

  • Apple’s guarantee for products ordered directly via Apple.com is limited to 1 year only instead of the 2 statutory ones granted in most of the countries in the EU
  • Apple Store refuses to provide the packaging box of the replacement unit. This refusal prevented me from knowing the IMEI of my replacement unit. This in turn makes all attempts to contact to their support a complicated and irritating process, either online or by phone
  • The guarantee of the replacement unit was limited to 3 months one, again materially shorter than the statutory scope in the EU
  • The is no way to recover any personal data on my iphone unit or via the backup at iTunes other than with yet a new Apple device.
  • Apple’s customer service is a non-geographical number. That means that the client pays for the call and Apple gets a kick back of the call from the local telephone operator.
  • Apple did not provide with a a escalation procedure to deal with their issues or an access to the customer Ombudsman at Apple. Apple’s support staff claimed that such procedures do not exist and that they could only provide me with the URL of a “feedback” form at http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
  • I also requested a way to dispose of my non-working unit. Their junk hardware is a hazardous waste with no recycling facility offered
  • Apple diverts their profits to Ireland to save taxes in most countries in the EU
  • The iphone is a sub-standard piece of hardware: it failed to sync over WiFi, the battery rarely lasts more than 12 hours under normal usage conditions, ie. no gaming
  • The iTunes software is a clunky and counter-intuitive piece of software: it failed to connect

Silence at Apple.com

I requested that you provide me with a replacement unit with a proper extension of its guarantee of 2 years from the order day of the original one.

All I got from my message was a thank you message at http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone_thankyou.html

Thank you for your feedback on the iPhone.We cannot respond to you personally, but please know that your message has been received and will be reviewed by the iPhone Team. If we need to follow up with you on your ideas for improving the iPhone, we will contact you directly.
We appreciate your assistance in making the iPhone better.
iPhone Team
Apple

The iphone sucks and increasingly so

The right amount of sex, kinky neardenthals and walking Easter Island statues

Posted by acute accent – 24 October 2012

Is it possible to have just the right amount of sex? The mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus) combines self-fertilization with occasional sex to keep the best genes providing immunity to pathogens http://bit.ly/TGh87t

Kinky neardenthals could party hard in feather garments and all, reported from Gibraltar

Some of the micro pictures selected by the Small World Photomicrography Competition

 

Replicas of Easter Island statues walking with a bit of help of idle holidaymakers by the look of it.

Coyotes took to trotting after joggers in public parks in the US. People took to shooting them down (the coyotes). Projectcoyote.org is working to raise the awareness about the behaviour of the coyotes. Which makes me wonder, if wolves are learning to coexist with humans in Spain, why foxes don’t live in cities and towns in Spain like they do in the United Kingdom?

Nationalism and the misery of the unrealized happiness

Posted by suspendeddisbelief – 2 September 2012

Europe, that puzzling and permanent experiment, is changing once again. Germans are turning ever more nationalistic and French ever more opportunistic. Nationalism ruined th Balcans at the end of the 20th century and now is it menacing the entire construct of the European Union.

The anxieties and fears of the Germans remind me of this quote of Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”:

“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”

This would be a perfect fit for nationalists of the 21st century. The powerful and rich, like the Germans who aim to retain their statu quo, and the poor and dejected, like the Kurds who struggle to be. The tragedy of nationalists is that they think that they do have a choice. They feel the call to change what seems an entropic situation -the tyranny of the alien- into an entalpic one: the freedom of ruling upon their own destiny.

As Dan Gilbert would put it, it is the overrated power of the natural happinness (independence and sovereignty) against the underrated accommodation of the synthetic happinness (domination by the aliens), as he explains in his talk “the surprising science of happiness“.

Engage in gossip

Posted by acute accent – 17 August 2012

Gossip is defined as “unconstrained conversation or reports about other people or groups, usually suggesting information that is not confirmed or verifiable as being true”.

Gossip is a sub-product of language. Reputation, good or bad, is one of the sub-products of gossip. And branding is one of the sub-products of reputation. Another one is stereotypes. Thus, sequentially:

Language > Gossip > Reputation > Branding | Stereotypes

Both branding and stereotypes are the fuel of social interaction online. Gossip is then one of the most underrated drivers of the development of Internet. It made Facebook and Twitter the monsters of communication of today.

Engage in gossip

Gossip is cheap and quick. It allows you to amplify your communication by talking or writing about things instead of doing them. Gossip can be started with very little actual information. Gossip is so efficient in communication terms because it rides the wave of latent prejudices and stereotypes.

The physics of gossip

Gossip is engaged by all sizes and types of entities capable of communicating. An individual can engage in gossip with another single individual or a groups or groups of people. Groups of any size, from football clubs, nations or even entire population speaking a language.

Gossip is transmitted in waves between the nodes of a social graph much like virus propagate in a population.