Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Apple implements user suggestion for latest iPod Shuffle (maybe)

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

In June 2007 I blogged about my iPod Shuffle and what was, in my opinion, its only flaw–the inability to find out information about the songs on its playlist (”The iPod Shuffle Killer Ap”). In that post, I suggested an enhancement–here’s a quote from that post:

Update the Shuffle’s software so that, if a certain button combination is pressed (perhaps skip and pause simultaneously), the mp3 tag–the information containing song title, artist, album, etc.–is read aloud. Then return to the song.

So imagine my surprise to read, 21 months later, about Apple’s new Shuffle:

Like all previous Shuffles, there’s no display, but Apple has added VoiceOver, its new synthesized-speech feature, that tells you what song is playing, who is singing it or what playlists you have [when you press a button].

There it is. I’m touched with pride, perhaps a little annoyed that I didn’t get credit, and, yes, cognizant that someone else (even someone at Apple) may have come up with the idea independently.

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Posted in product management | Comments

Customers are talking: another Apple MobileMe customer service nightmare

Friday, February 6th, 2009

This story came from Dick Spear as a comment to the prior post about Doc Searls’ issue with phone support for MobileMe. Have any of you had a similar (or different) experience? Tell your story in the comments and I’ll reblog here.

I had a more aggravating experience than Doc’s when I tried to get a Mobile Me error message stop opening up whenever I booted my machine. At first I tried with the Applecare techs, who are great. But, it turned out that they could not do it and I was told that I had to deal with MobileMe techs. I asked for the support number and was told there wasn’t any. I had to go to the website and enter into an online chat session. At first I said no way and asked to speak to a support customer relations group asking for my $100 back that I had just paid for my second year of .mac. Here is the interesting part. This support tech tried to get in touch wth the MM people on my behalf and they did not respond to her. So, she said that I could not get my $100 back, but that I could buy anything up to $150 at the Apple store. The only thing of any interest to me, was the new Nano and I wanted the 16GB model that went for $200. When I told her that this was what I wanted, she did not hesitate for one second. Said that it would be sent out that day. It arrived the next day via FedX. So, I was molified for a couple of months but the error message that no one could get rid of really started to get to me. And, my .mac email account was screwed up, I had not received any emails in over a month. So, I took the plunge and entered into a MM online support chat session.
If you want to talk about frustrating this is the activity that best describes the word. There is no doubt that my tech at the other end of this session was servicing multiple customers. The whole session took about 2 hours and he was able to get rid of the error message but could not solve the email problem even though MM was receiving my emails but not passing them off to my .mac account.
I complained vociferously to this tech telling him that I would rate this support as a .5 on a scale of one to 100. The worst experience of my life. I will never re-up for MM when my year expires.
I would suggest to anyone that considers to drink the MM koolade to leave it alone. The AppleCare support that I purchased with my Mac I would rate at 99 out of 100. Too bad that Apple decided to dis this segment of their user base.

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Posted in Customers Are Talking | Comments