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Apple Sent Two Men to My House
- citruspi 10y agoContext[0], since I didn't see a link in the article. Also, the discussion[1]. [0]: https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/ https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-mus... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11634600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11634600
- madeofpalk 10y agoThis whole saga has been a pretty interested set of events, amusing to watch as a bystander who's been observing Apple for a long time while they go through many changes. Regardless, reminds me of Eddy Cue driving over to Federighi's house late one night to report a bug[0]: When Cue ran into a problem installing a new build of OS X on that iMac, in fact, he could tell as a veteran software tester that the bug might be hard to reproduce, plus he was scheduled to take a trip the very next day. “I called Craig up, said have your guys look at it, I think it would be hard to re-create. He said sure, so I put the iMac in my car and drove it over,” as in, to Federighi’s house. Cue went on his business trip, Federighi’s team fixed the problem, and Cue got his iMac back when he returned—kind of like a Genius Bar for the C-suite. [0]: http://www.macworld.com/article/3033057/ios/eddy-cue-and-craig-federighi-discuss-the-state-of-apple-software-with-john-gruber.html http://www.macworld.com/article/3033057/ios/eddy-cue-and-cra...
- internaut 10y agoThat's one way to solve edge cases I suppose. If your assassins tell you to watch Firefly they can finish their work before Season 2. It shows there are good people everywhere.
- themartorana 10y agoWe came within moments of buying a customer a new phone in exchange for shipping us her old phone with a non-reproducible bug. Got lucky and found the issue just prior, so sent her a little something nice for the trouble.
- ChrisDutrow 10y agoCompared to the cost of extra developer time, this seems like a reasonable cost solution.
- internaut 10y agoOh I'm not knocking it for NR errors.
- megablast 10y agoThis was originally from an article titles "Apple stole my music", whereas iTunes deleted music from his computer. I doubt the old Apple would have gone to so much trouble, good to see the new Apple appearing to be more concerned and open.
- dvhh 10y agoProbably trying to find a solution for the PR issue
- tomc1985 10y agoThe deletion thing has been known for months. Now Apple does something? And a special version of itunes? Does nobody over there collect mp3s?
- wmccullough 10y agoWhat would you rather them do? Folks can't have it both ways. In one corner, people bitch because apple isn't doing anything, and in the other, they start bitching because they did do something. This stuff gets old after awhile. The older I get the more I hate the Internet.
- tomc1985 10y agoMe too. How about Apple not fucks up in the first place? How about people put out software that works and not this MVP bullshit that passes for a finished product? How about respecting the user by default?
- rarepostinlurkr 10y agoStarting from a position of "Don't make mistakes" from a series of fallible entities (Computers, People) seems like a position doomed to failure.
- tomc1985 10y agoMake less mistakes? Test more? Don't move so fast? And you know what? I will expect perfection. Because if someone has the gall to destroy people's stuff they better execute to fucking perfection
- CamperBob2 10y agoReached back for the bottle, rubbed against the lamp / Genie came out smiling like some Eastern tramp. "OK, iTunes is now written to DoD/NASA/JPL coding standards. It has zero bugs. That will be $69,105,000.00 per user, please. Oh, and we expect to support 16-bit audio by 2024. You're good with 8 for now, right?"
- JarvisSong 10y agoIt's great that this happened. It's annoying that it indicates the best way to get support from Apple is to make a prominent blog post.
- ipp 10y ago> It's annoying that it indicates the best way to get support from Apple is to make a prominent blog post. Posting somewhere public (for example, a company's social media page) to get support appears to be an increasing trend.
- viraptor 10y agoWhich really means "we don't care if you're unhappy, we care if other people know you're unhappy" :(
- wyldfire 10y agoMaybe instead of thinking of it as some sort of decline in service we should consider it as a net improvement in global communication. Media has democratized and you don't even need to convince the local TV news crew to cover your story anymore. You can just make a clear, coherent complaint in your own forum and occasionally [like in this case] it actually brings about a transformation. I doubt that Apple's customer service is any worse now than it was before.
- vidarh 10y agoI'd like to think that is the case... When I was a child, we got a phone number that was one digit away from the number of a major hospital. That would have been bad enough, but Norway had area codes that covered very small areas at the time, and were optional within the area. Lots of people didn't remember the area code and so always used it, but would guess based on location of the person they dialled. The one digit difference was in the area code.. As a result we started getting calls about medical emergencies in the middle of the night. The local phone company did not see this as a problem either for us or the hospital or people calling with emergencies, but offered to put us on a waiting list (!) potentially for months before they could be bothered to change the number. Until my dad had hounded the reporters at the local newspaper until they wrote a piece about it - suddenly it was fixed within a day or two. So public attention worked back then too (this was early 80's) - there was just fewer outlets and more work to get your problems published. These days it doesn't take much before I go for social media. Another option I've found works (but is pricey) is to sign up (temporarily if you don't otherwise need it) for one of LinkedIn's premium tiers and use that to get access to top execs at the company you have an issue with. Often the issue is not so much to draw public attention, but that drawing public attention is the simplest way of getting the attention of and access to a senior enough executive.
- arcticfox 10y agoApple sent two engineers out to look at something that couldn't be repro'd? Super unproductive. Sounds like solely a PR move. A good one, I think, but a little strange. Basically just "let's listen to some tunes while we score these PR points."
- yarou 10y agoThe bugs that are the most difficult to solve are often unreproducible; and the hardest to find. That's what makes them so dangerous - if it were easily reproducible, they could have simply taken a bug report and fixed the issue.
- lallysingh 10y agoIf paying customers are losing data and you can't reproduce locally, yeah, it's worth a few plane tickets.
- StillBored 10y agoThese days it seems 99% of onsite visits for software problems are code for "We really care, and are doing are best". Mostly because of webex/etc desktop sharing software allow the support personnel basically the same access they get as being onsite minus the ability to move cables/etc around. Some of the more enterprise software/hardware has "backdoor" functionality built in where the user presses the remote support button and it punches a hole through to the vendors DMZ where their developers can access the machine directly rather than having the user peering over their shoulder the whole time.
- abalone 10y agoNah, data loss is a serious bug and warrants investigation if the report sounds legit, which in this case it does. Why are you not patting Apple on the back for committing such resources to try to repro the bug? Why so cynical?
- mirimir 10y agoA couple years ago, Amazon deleted Animal Farm and 1984 from customers' devices ;)
- DigitalJack 10y agoAll vendors are equal, but some vendors are more equal than others.
- rpgmaker 10y agoYeah but it was intentional while this ITMS issue seems to be because of a bug.
- mirimir 10y agoNo, Apple was deleting stuff intentionally. That's clear from the articles and cited Apple boilerplate. The bug just caused unintended deletion. My point is that any deletion is dangerous and unwarranted. If for no other reason, because it increases the risk of catastrophic bugs like this one. Sure, people should be backing up their stuff. But in this case, Apple acted like filecrypter malware. Worse, in fact, because there's no recovery key.
- rpgmaker 10y agoYou don't have to tell me. I don't trust any streaming service. Whatever streaming I have to do I do it from own "cloud".
- Steko 10y agoThe other day I played one of my "Jedi Mind Tricks" albums on iTunes (yes this happened in 2016, because reasons) and as each song played it disappeared from the album list. Apparently the songs were being repopulated in another album under "Army of the Pharaohs" because either iTunes (or I?) had decided to rename the artist at some point. Probably related, possibly dated: you might want your albums from "The Dwarves" and "Dwarves" (don't judge me man) to be listed together because they are the same band and it's not my fault ITMS has it wrong but if you rename one, good old iCloud will happily download a new copy of the one you renamed.
- Loughla 10y agoThe Dwarves. I just. I. Who. Why? I honestly never thought I would talk to someone who would actually own and listen to their albums. Why would you do that? Are you a masochist? The 'music' is just awful, the shows are (at least they used to be) amazing. But the 'music' is just so bad. Why do you do that to yourself?
- throwanem 10y agoIsn't that basically all punk, though? Inasmuch as punk still exists, that is. If you just buy the albums, you're simultaneously engaging in self-abuse and subsidizing the people smart enough to go to the shows, where actual enjoyment is to be had. And, to the extent you let on that this is what you do, you're identifying yourself as an oblivious trend-follower who confuses the trappings of someone else's broken idea of "cool" with anything that actually matters - the musical-taste equivalent of The Office's Michael Scott. Or have I missed something here?
- Steko 10y ago> Why would you do that? Nostalgia? > Are you a masochist? I hope not. > The 'music' is just awful, Some is sure but on the whole melodic/surf punk is far from the worst genre, I've heard a lot worse and I only listen to certain tracks. Also I gave explicit instructions not to judge me, man :)
- raddad 10y ago
- corndoge 10y agoI fail to see how this is interesting
- Cheyana 10y agoAbout 20 years ago, when MASM was still for sale on the retail shelf, I called Microsoft with a problem when the help files wouldn't install (from floppy). The person on the other end showed me how to extract them manually, then later in the week I had not one, but two calls back on my answering machine following up and hoping everything was going okay with my installation and if I had any issues to please call them back. Those were the days.
- huhtenberg 10y agoAye. Around the same time a friend of mine sent a physical letter to Microsoft reporting some minor bug with DOS 3.x. Not a couple of months after they replied thanking for the report, confirming the bug and saying that it was now fixed. On an official letterhead with watermark, signed by a real person.
- brianwawok 10y agoYou can get that kind of support (but in email over paper) for many smalltime webapps now. Just doesn't scale well for a million customers ;)
- anjc 10y agoI'm confused by this article. The engineers both do not dispute what their rep said on the phone, and also admit that it was not user error. But they have not said that it should not have happened. Maybe I'm misreading? Has anybody said that this was not meant to happen? They've accepted that it deleted their files, but was it a bug or not?
- AJRF 10y agoI bet the guy turned on iCloud Music Library and hit replace.