You have to learn to live with Apple bugs

by Volker Weber

When you run into a bug on an Apple product, you turn to Apple Support. It's your only resolve. And Support will try to fix your mistake. I recently gave up explaining to support that in fact their backend wasn't working. For the life of it, they would not log a bug. Not even after more than 1000 people had the same issue.

Even if I got Support to acknowledge there was indeed a bug in the backend, it would have ended up here. I often wondered why Apple was unable to fix security holes reported to them by the Google Project Zero team.

It's not that nobody cares. But they can't do anything about it. The buck stops on Craig Federighi's desk.

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Comments

Sad, but true. I have tried several times to report bugs to bugreport.apple.com but they were never treated seriously.

I gave up.

Andy Brunner, 2019-03-12

Unfortunately, I have had the same experiences. Although you shouldn't forget that a good prioritization and processing of support requests on the scale and at the level of Apple is by far not a trivial challenge. On the other hand, if Apple doesn't have the tools and know-how, who does?

Stefan Domanske, 2019-03-12

Time for a Craig or Tim mail?

Bodo Menke, 2019-03-12

There are well known standards, e.g.
ISO 20000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_20000)
There is no need to (re-)invent the wheel.
Apple could have known better.

Uwe Brahm, 2019-03-12

Stefan, Google does. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1702/1702.01715.pdf

Volker Weber, 2019-03-12

I made the same experience two weeks ago. The solution they provided to me was a "book an apple consultant" who will help me to do "things right". The error is well documented in the net and I can reproduce it.

Torben Volkmann, 2019-03-12

The discussion is gaining traction, Corbin Dunn's post has garnered a lot of attention:

Michael Tsai: The Sad State of Logging Bugs for Apple.

Ben Poole, 2019-03-12

Doh, should pay attention to the updated policy re HTML links ;-)

https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2019/03/the-sad-state-of-logging-bugs-for-apple/

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/03/11/the-sad-state-of-logging-bugs-for-apple/

Ben Poole, 2019-03-12

I can't get Intel to fix a graphics driver bug that is causing trouble for users since 2015. Tried several times to report the bug through various channels, they are still telling me that the driver's behaviour is according to the HDMI spec. (Yet NVIDIA and AMD drivers are not affected.)

So it's not just Apple.

Hanno Zulla, 2019-03-13

Useless, time wasting support affects a lot of tech companies. I can see why this would be the default mode of dealing with consumers - 99% are clueless - but there needs to be an escalation path for professionals, and this is where you should be sent quickly when you have a paid support contract. Even in the IT pro space, an increasing number of vendors have adopted the "it's not a bug if it's not in our system yet" attitude. It's frustrating for customers and does nothing to help improve your product. What it DOES achieve is vastly inflated metrics - "99.9% of cases are walkthroughs", "case closed due to no response", "total minutes spent on cases" etc. The use of surrogate metrics for quality will quickly ruin the reputation of product and company. And it will create more support cases going forward because bugs aren't fixed in time, clogging your support process. My guess is that better metrics tied to product quality outcomes - e.g. expect X% legitimate bug escalations from 1st line to 2nd tier - would make for a vastly improved support experience.

Jan Tietze, 2019-03-13

Any thoughts on "why" it would be like that? I find it very surprising. Apple's selling products in the premium range and of of their USPs is "trust". Bugs and vulnarabilities kill trust. It is also hard to imagine that Apple would not be capable (technically and financially) to do better.

Dirk Rose, 2019-03-13

Is this a typo or a pun?
"The buck stops on Craig Federighi's desk."

Mike Hartmann, 2019-03-14

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing

Volker Weber, 2019-03-14

Old vowe.net archive pages

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