After six long days, Apple has issued an official statement on the debacle that was / is the
MobileMe transition, and has offered a 30-day extension to contracts as an olive branch to disgruntled users. According to a form letter being sent to subscribers, the company openly admits that the switch to MobileMe was "a lot rockier than hoped," and claims that the service is now running smoothly. Additionally (and somewhat surprisingly) Apple rescinded its use of the word "push" to cover all of its services, conceding that while there is indeed push to-and-from iPhones and the "cloud," computers are still being polled every 15 minutes... which is the same as .Mac (and honestly Apple, you didn't know that wasn't technically push?). We suppose this would be all well and good provided that MobileMe was actually functioning as advertised, but indications from readers -- and our own testing -- suggest otherwise. Customers are still having difficulties with email and syncing between iPhones and the cloud (duplicate messages, deleted messages that don't leave the inbox, etc.), the advertised "auto-complete" on mail addressing doesn't function at all, and calendars are plagued with small moving / deletion problems, as well as being unable to sync subscriptions... and that's just off the top of our head (see the company's support forums for more). The 30-day extension is a nice gesture Apple, but we're thinking customers would prefer a service that works as advertised.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
posted July 16th 2008 11:21AM
A month ago I had my original iphone stop working on cell service. It was very bizarre. I had owned the phone for over 6 months and thought I was out of luck. I called up apple and they sent me a brand spanking new phone.
I'm not saying apple is the only company with good customer service. But i've been using apple products for years and am always 100% satisfied when I have to call customer service.
As zak said, the phone is not expensive. Plus, the added value of a constantly updated OS is something I've never had before in a phone and I'm quite happy with it.
@Zak,
I do love Apples, but I have to disagreee with you, when you say that Apple has "very good quality control", what are you actually referring to ?
As you know quality control and enginneering are involved at all level within assembly and delivery.
Apple is not an manufacturer, it is an assemble; it buys off the shelf components and put them together in a package for delivery.
In terms of software, we tend to employ Quality management, rather than simply quality control, to ensure that product specified is product delivered, within all parameters. The Mobile Me product was brought to the market too quickly, and not tested well enough. The facts of this speak for themselves.
However, Apple is facing a great deal of problems at the moment in terms of delivery of quality products, largely because of loss of 'quality' staff; this is turn is largely due to the poor wages that Apple pays.
Design is obviously part of the quality problems. We don't have to go far back to give examples of highlky scratchable casing in the ipod range of product. You can't over look this.
The terrible specification of the Mac Mini Gen 1 product was another example of bad quality control. Aweful failure rate in all aspects.
Apple does seem to have quite severe quality problems in its products, some of this is due to insufficient quality testing of supplier products, some is due to assembly error. However both cases stem back to what you refer to as failures in "Quality Control".
To say that Apple has"good" quality control is a little subjective, but does belie the experiences and emperical observations that I have made whilst waiting to get product analysed and fixed at the "Genius" bar.
I have witnessed great strife from Apple customers. Even if you are lucky enough to have not had a problem with your product , you take a trip to the genius bar sometime and hang out for an hour or 4.
kccboy - that's extremely faulty logic. That's like saying that if you go to Apple's support pages and look at all the people having problems, it means that all people are having problems, when in fact it's far less than 1% of the total of Mac owners that are having problems. If you look at support forums, you will find people who need support. People who are having zero problems don't post on support forums, do they?
Your claim that there is a decline of QC because of a loss of quality staff due to wages is completely and totally unquantifiable. I'm going to call you on this one and ask you to provide proof that this is the case.
Plastic is scratchable, yes. That's not a quality control issue, because non-scratchable plastic hasn't been invented yet. People put their iPod in their pocket with their keys, and then complain to Apple when it gets scratched. The specs of the Mac Mini has nothing to do with quality control. You don't like the specs, but that's your problem. It's not a quality control issue because it's not broken.
I don't agree that Apple has "quite severe" quality problems in some of their products. The fact of our reality is that any product that comes from any assembly line will have a failure rate. Apple's failure rate has historically been relatively low, which indicates good QC, not bad.
30 days is always nice, although they better had get those problems fixed within those 30 days.
Apple's been increasingly having these problems with product. With their Studio apps they've been increasingly promising all these amazing things, and they simply just don't work when we get them.
Getting too big Apple? PR making promises that programmers can't keep up with?
yea i got that email. one other thing that isn't working that's worth mentioning is iweb. i sent an email to their support because i keep getting publishing errors for my site (iagreewiththemoviedude.com) and 6 days is too long to sit idly by. we'll see what they say when they get back to me within 48 hours, unless of course this generic message counts as their response. when i get home from work tonight i'll see if it works now.
No matter what Apple does, you whiners still complain, cry and pout
Good. The people got their apology and free use of MobileMe for a month. That should placate most "victims". Might as well move on to the next HUGE Apple problem to gripe about. Where's iPhone copy/paste?
Amazing how nothing was mentioned about the overcharging of trial subscribers. Seriously, how do you make a billing error where a customer is charged over the amount of a yearly subscription when it is supposed to be a $1\€1\£1 verification charge? I agree with some of the earlier posts, Apple pushed MobileMe out WAY too early and that their marketing teams are promising the world when the reality is something far different. I guess Apple is starting to experience some of the drawbacks to a larger user base, something they have never had before. Hopefully they can fix the issues in a timely manner and learn from their mistakes.
i actually gave up on the calendar "push" even working. i turned it "off" and just sync it when i plug my iphone in. i have too many calendars that i subscribe to that i need/want to see that infromation for. did they think i wouldnt?
i honestly feel duped. i have bled apple red (or whatever their colors are) for years now and was so excited when i watched the video about "push" and read every article on apple.com/moblieme about the new product. then on the same day that it goes live to magically change all the literature to read "will sync within 15 minutes" is just wrong.
exchage for the rest of us? not quite...
Maybe y'all missed the part where they wrote:
"we are going to stop using the word "push" until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too."
Which implies that it will be fixed.
No matter what Apple does, you applets still ooh, ah and gush.
...and you freaks come in here anyway and spout your crap presumably because you have no life. Way to go.
PLEASE...PUSH is a word used for always on, always connected IP addressed device that the server sends data to when ever needed!
A device that connects, gets an IP address and then syncs to a server every few minutes to get updates is not a PUSH enabled technology, That is called PULL!
BlackBerrys are the only fully True Mobile PUSH devices at this time!
PUSH is not about speed as Apple thinks!
Again Apple is a great marketing company and a great designing company but as we all can see from some major enginering fauz paux's it's not and engineering company!
The T-Mobile sidekick is "always on" and "push". It is a glowing example, especially the instant messaging clients.
I don't know, maybe I'm lucky but nearly everything currently advertised for MobileMe is working great.
Am I one of the few?
Apple flat out LIED.
It is that simple.
Sorry fanboys.
this isn't politics... i still get email and calendars pushed to the phone and synced with the computers...
why are there so many ignorant people steeped in extremism?
I just want to be able to share calendars between the members in my mobileme family pack.
This is what sets Apple apart from MS... I don't care for either company, but Apple's willingness to take responsibility for its mess, and then offer an apology & compensation is awesome... we need more businesses willing to show integrity like this, and lead they way to better consumer experiences.
Add to that the incredible complexity of the mobilme platform, the best attempt to date to bring complex, anywhere access to data for consumers and hey, we can live with a fumble or two... after all we have been browbeat by MS and conditioned to live with a whole lot worse in mainstream computing.
I say good job Apple... though I wouldn't have wanted to be in the room when Jobs got involved...
Has anyone gotten MobileMe to work with just their iPhone while not utilizing Outlook or a computer-based calendar/contact program?
What I mean, is that all of my "stuff" is on my iPhone. None of it is on my home or office computer. It's just the way I do things. What I want is to get my stuff (contacts and calendar entries only) from my iPhone to the cloud/MobileMe webpage. That way, I can add new entries much quicker using a computer, rather than having to type everything in on my iPhone.
Does this make sense?
. . .Still waiting for that apology from Microsoft for Windows Vista and Windows ME, and in fact they never actually issued an apology for all the network outages on Xbox Live, either.
Oh, wait. Microsoft doesn't apologize. Ever. The best they ever did was offered a free ($5 value) Live Arcade game of their choice (for a limited time) when they botched up Live access for a few weeks, and they left it to Major Nelson to kinda sorta say, "Yeah. It was down. Here's a cheap game to make you forget, peons."
But not one apology, or free offer, for those of us who paid for Windows ME, and so far they haven't even admitted all their faults with Windows Vista.
The bloody one-click file sharing is also not enabled. I was supposed to be able to upload files to iDisk and send anyone a download link to retrieve them. That feature has been removed completely. That was one of my major interests in the program.
someone wake me when mobile me lets me email from my domain name and not mac.com or me.com.
Yer i was well pissed by this, especially since they are supposed to offer personal domain management.
gmail host your domain email and forward it to mobileme. it isn't difficult.
yep .. big big headache with mobileme .. extending 30 days on something that don't work does not do much for anyone.
so the demo they did are all faked ... even when Steve said make the new 3G phone more affordable .. :P he did not mention .. we will let ATT screw you
Who really cares if email is "push" or not? If you get it in a few minutes, what's the difference? (15 might be too long though).
What really needs "push" is something like AIM. WTF good is AIM if it doesn't deliver the messages when your phone is in your pocket?
IF YOU HATE APPLE AND IT'S PRODUCTS SO FUCKING MUCH, FUCKING LEAVE APPLE AND JOIN MICROSOFT. WHINE WHINE WHINE TROLL TROLL TROLL
I didn't get the letter. Maybe Apple knows I turned off my auto-renew (for next month) and is willing to cut their losses.
Still unable to login to me.com despite that Apple support said it should work soon but was only down due to the madness of the switch when I contacted them a few days ago. :( uggh.
Crap, and I turned off auto renew literally 12 hours ago because I planned on buying a MobileMe box off Amazon. I didn't realize my subscription had only 50 days left.
Now thanks for the 30-day extension for the Mobile Me transition; now what about all the times .Mac didn't work?
Always on does not mean Powered on......It means it is always an active node on the internet!
Push technology, or server push, describes a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction originates with the publisher or central server. It is contrasted with pull technology, where the request for the transmission of information originates with the receiver or client.
Apple's MobileMe is not push!
Dave
i hate to break it to you, i was in hong kong, and so far everything was peachy. though i will have to say the evening i picked up the phone i had some trouble registering it, cause you guys were all probably doing the same thing in the morning in the us of a. but it's all cool. we still have small issues with some of the calendar not updating on the phone, but 90% of the time, i can count to 5 and the info is "pushed" to phone.
@Zak,
If you are still there, here is a link to verfiy what you have called me on:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/17/2221205
@Zak,
I think that you need to look again at what you are really talknig about when it comes to Quality control. I respectfully think that you don't really know much about this, maybe nothing at all.
I think that you are confusing Quality Control with Quality Testing.
Quality control will cover many areas including the original specification of the product as suiting the purpose for which it was intended.
The Mac Mini's terrible specification and the absurd and highly publicised scratchability of the Nano for instance, (way over and above any other product), are examples of poor quality control.
Have a read up on the subject. Hope that this helps,