Fake and gay. They will never say your device has parts missing since they know most customers aren’t that stupid. They most of the time say you have water damage or it’s too old for repair.
The Apple Genius Bar sucks ass. But let’s not pretend like any of the other big tech companies do any better. At least Apple has a physical store where they can fuck you over in person. Try getting Samsung shit repaired. In most countries they let a 3rd party company do the handling and repairs and you can’t visit that company. You have to send it in and if they deem your device unrepairable or “not” broken they send it back and you have to pay for shipping both ways even if the device falls under warranty and sometimes they send it back more broken then when it left your hands. While communication happens solely trough email.
I worked the Genius Bar for 3 years and only left a couple of years ago.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, in the UK at least, that there is no lying going on. We don’t care about upselling you anything. If we can repair your phone or replace the battery we will.
The reason we decline for say water damage or unauthorised repair is because they want to guarantee the repairs with a warranty and that is hard to do when it has been water damaged or someone else has been in and maybe fucked something up.
Plenty of shit Apple do wrong but the service here is top notch compared to any other manufacturer.
Plenty of shit Apple do wrong but the service here is top notch compared to any other manufacturer.
I don’t understand how this can ever be argued when apple’s record against consumer’s right to repair is like a dictator’s record against their own people.
Is this a case of “Yeah, he killed millions of citizens, that’s true. But he really developed infrastructure”?
Can confirm for America too—I worked there also and saw the same. There are moisture indicators inside the device that the phone owner can’t see, and if those are triggered, then it could have done microscopic damage to the internal components. If Apple fixes it and it dies a week later from water damage, the customer will blame Apple, so they choose to replace the unit when they see the indicators have been triggered.
“Missing parts” is not a likely phrase they would have ever used.
There was a scandal years ago because the moisture indicators were found to be wildly over-sensitive, and changing colour in inappropriate situations, e.g. it being a bit humid because it was raining, being in someone’s pocket when their clothes were a little too warm so they sweated, or having been brought into a bathroom within a couple of hours of someone showing. Some were already showing water damage immediately after leaving the Apple Store when journalists investigated.
If the Genius Bar staff are told the water damage indicators indicate water damage, then they don’t have to lie to say they can’t repair a phone. If some percentage of phones have indicators that simply don’t work correctly, then people will have repairs rejected when they know their phone’s never been near water, so it’ll look like the staff are lying.
The situation must have improved because this was headline news years ago and I’ve not seen it mentioned since, but even if it’s a fixed problem, it still gave Apple a reputation for refusing to do repairs for nonsensical reasons.
I know a few people that are hard Apple users and they’ve told me that it really depends on the Apple store. Some are good, and some just are the worst and won’t repair if they can upsell. Maybe your shop was good, but you might be surprised to find that it isn’t always like that everywhere else.
Why did you have to bring homosexuality into this? I thought we were past using gay as a pejorative.
Nah, and I say this as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
They have become cringe again.
Give us Stonewall queers not Rainbow Capitalists who only show up when it’s a party.
Non-related but pretty nice. Broke my pixel 6a screen. I could pay 200 euro to repair shop or order a new screen with in this case ifixit for 110 euro and get all the tools required. Went with the second option and got the satisfaction of replacing my own screen. Worked out perfect and got an official screen. Can’t do that with all phones but pretty nice option imho.
You know, if you don’t live near an Apple store, then your Apple stuff is most likely going to be repaired by a 3rd party company on Apple’s behalf. And I don’t mean “there are no Apple stores in the country” places, but places that have Apple stores but you aren’t close enough to drive (like multiple hours away).
Parts missing? I don’t believe this at all. A phone is basically a single board, screen, battery, lenses, audio bits. Everything is so jammed in that there’s no room to think parts are missing. No tech would make this mistake and Apple doesn’t benefit from generating a hostile customer experience. This is made up.
Sorry details may be fake, but I do believe an apple employee would pull some shot because policy dictates they sell new equipment over fixing old equipment.
I was a tech in a store and covered a fee on a replacement device because it was the second time the guy had to come to us. I gave a young woman (student) a free laptop because she’d had a super long repair history during my last week in that role. Apple conditions their retail employees to treat customers well and it’s something I missed getting to do for people forever after.
When I moved to the mothership, the only mantra was always about doing right by our customers. When I was interviewing for that gig, I asked one of the interviewers what he considered challenging about the job and he said that (coming from Microsoft to Apple) the company had an “insane” focus on its customers. It really is a top-down attitude. The company may be high sniffing their own farts, but they believe they’re uniquely focused on doing the right thing.
Every apple fanboy I talk to gushes about how amazing the genius bar is, helping them when they get their iPhone stuck in their ass.
But every casual user who has different problems beyond getting an iPhone stuck in their ass seems to get the same response: “Buy the next version”.
I dunno though I’m forced to use the apple products from work.
The only way i would believe it is if they meant a screw or two or one of the flat metal plates that is used to secure other components. Ive repaired i pho es and they are a pain tk deal with and sometimes you forget exactly which screw goes where when they are mostly so small they all look the same. I misplaced a small plastic component thst acts as a sound amplifying cone to direct your voice soundwaves to the microphone use for phone calls and it made it so people couldnt hear me unless i used the speaker phone. But thats no good reason not to repair. They should have drawers filled with those screws and other internal irrelevant components
I used to work for Apple. I don’t believe the missing parts story because as you said, how would that even happen. But, if any parts have been replaced, especially the home buttons / finger print reader, they will refuse to fix, and I never understand why. So that may be what happened.
Also Jobs was 100% behind this stuff. It’s so annoying when people treat him like he was some tech god. He was a twat.
The refusal is likely tied to liability, in that they see any aftermarket parts or OoW repairs as a potential failure point and fear the customer may blame them for it. It wouldn’t even matter if the quality of work or parts is as good or better. There’s also another factor of trying to oversimplify any repairs/service to allow them to eventually hire unqualified/uneducated ‘techs’ for things who don’t have a clue what’s going on.
A lot of it is single board, but there are smaller PCB layered in there connected by ribbon cables or press-in connections. I replaced the battery in my iphone and it’s a tedious but doable DIY project. Anyway, the way it’s assembled doesn’t lend itself to missing parts. Parts of or the whole phone won’t work. No way would phone arrive “missing” parts - unless there was external damage to any cameras or switches.
Does less, costs more!
Windows sells my personal data, enshittifies all their software, and the UX annoys me five times per day; OSX doesn’t. It’s worth the extra money.
There are good alternatives to both of those, and they’re free, and very customizable.
Linux is great but it’s not suitable for most people. When something breaks you need the command line to fix it.
Steve Jobs was evil af
Why, exactly? Genuinely asking. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m no Apple fan, and he was absolutely an insufferable douchebag to nearly everyone he knew; and was a verifiable self-righteous fuckwit who Darwin’d himself out of existence by choosing woo-woo bullshit over medicine for a very treatable cancer.
Evil, though, I think might be a stretch – Elon, Thiel, Vance, Trump, Murdoch, the Sackler family, the Koch brothers, etc. all excellent contenders for being truly evil – but afaik Jobs was just a dickhead with an ego the size of a blimp, and I think we ought not dilute that term with just your run-of-the-mill dickheads. Unless you know something I don’t about him.
This told me nothing I didn’t already know. Like I said, he was a dickhead, to almost every single person in his personal and professional life. But evil requires a level of maliciousness that transcends the people you are in physical contact with, imo – you have to be actively striving to make life worse for at least a few hundred people or more.
A dickhead and a shitty father, sure, I’m not defending his actions in the slightest. But “evil” would require him to have done something much worse than just treat his kid and the people in his immediate orbit like shit. Just my opinion.
To start with, Jobs lied and cheated Wozniak out of money. And this was Jobs friend, not some random.
If he is willing to do this to his friends, you know he did it to others.
