[EstesPark]

> As someone who spends a lot of time working with technology and did his stint in tech support, I have a certain natural recalcitrance to turning to the company itself for help. I presumed that I would be made to run through a litany of time-wasting tests to establish what I had already concluded. But without much in the way of recourse, I resolved to give it a shot and fired up a chat session.

And here is why I love apple. I can either spend all the time attempting to investigate and fix the solution in a way the author did, or I can simply pick up the phone and let Apple do it for me.

I can't imagine the pain had this been Google.

[smoldesu]

> “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.”

...and this part is why I don't love Apple. Don't get me wrong; calling a number is the lowest-friction fix for most people. But if I can't know why things broke, I can't feel comfortable doing things 'like normal' again. The lack of transparency when things go wrong is the worst part of dealing with companies like Google, for me.

[Aeolun]

Except that they didn’t solve the issue. “Please wait 12 hours” is not a solution to “I can’t access my email”.

[jsnell]

Also, nothing in the story suggests that calling customer support in any way expedited returning access.

[AnonC]

> And here is why I love apple. I can either spend all the time attempting to investigate and fix the solution in a way the author did, or I can simply pick up the phone and let Apple do it for me.

This may probably work out to be a waste of time. When iMessage stopped working for me and I couldn’t even activate it for my phone number (just out of the blue), I contacted Apple support. They followed up with me over a few months, installing a profile to collect more logs, asking me to perform some steps, send logs, videos of what I was seeing when I tried activating it, many other steps, etc. The case was then transferred to another person because the one handling it was “not available”. Then after some days, it was just crickets. No responses on chats or emails on that case. They just dropped it as if I’d never contacted them at all.

I’m not saying this is how it’ll play out for everyone in every situation. But what’s clear to me is that even Apple’s engineering team — the one that received all the logs and knows things at the code level — has limits on its understanding of the software and devices as well as what it’s willing to do to solve problems.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Sounds like a great, Apple-like experience. The person got great customer service. The problem was resolved relatively quickly. But the process was opaque.

[amf12]

not to nitpick, but waiting 12 hours for resolution isn't "relatively quick".