Posted on 12/18/2011 4:22:25 PM PST by varmintman
Prior to 02 I'd gone for some time hoping I could die of old age without ever touching a cellphone but that clearly wasn't going to happen; I was getting into too much trouble from not being able to find pay phones which basically stopped existing around that time. I mean, superman never had to look more than 30 feet for a phone booth to change in, but he'd go crazy now.
And then, a bit less than a year ago, the company I work for insisted on me buying an Iphone and the main idea was having access to email on the road. I mean, I'd never wanted anything to do with Apple after the stunt they pulled shutting down the Atari 520ST in 85, but I ignored any misgivings I may have had and bought the thing....
The biggest problem has been the thing getting a mote of dust or lint or something in that little hole for headphones and believing it was working with headphones when it wasn't. That keeps the user from hearing the other guy unless he figures out what's going on and puts the phone on speaker. The problem can usualy be fixed by blowing PC cleaning air into the headphone hole but it can take an hour or more of doing that.
That is still preferable to taking the thing to the local Apple store for service. Their normal mode is to have you make an appointment to be seen in two or three or four days and that basically means going several days off the air.
Then there's the thing about batteries. If a battery dies on any other cell phone you buy a new battery for $20 or $30 and replace the dead one. The Iphone needs to be replaced if a battery dies and, that's right, you need to make an appointment for that and that can mean several days off the air.
I mean, who the hell would buy a car which had to be replaced whenever a battery died.....
But the kicker came yesterday morning when the thing (actually the second one after the first being replaced for a battery), not only pulled its ugly little thing of acting like it thought it was on imaginary headphones, but aside from me not hearing other people other than on speaker, nobody else could hear me.
The normal deal with ATT is to be eligible for phone upgrades every two years; in this case the situation wasn't going to go for another year or more and I simply paid the full price for a Samsung/Android phone and the best ATT could do was a trade-in program which gave me 200 for the Iphone so that the whole deal cost more like 400 than 600, but I view that as money well spent, the Samsung Galaxy appears to be a much nicer phone.
Funny thing, they (Apple) got to thinking they could push anybody around the same way after that and tried the same thing with Microsoft and HP (Windows) and it blew up in their faces, HP’s countersuit charged Apple with racketeering and violation of RICO statutes.
You are not the norm.
I have never had better customer service than from apple.
I have had batteries and iphones other apple products replaced out of warranty multiple times. I can’t think of another company (other than Daisy - the bb gun company) that does that.
Thanks. Sometimes I'm in the backwoods far from towers and would like a tablet that can work with GPS without needing access to towers or wifi. That way I can do without the small, sized car GPS and use something bigger in the vehicle than a personal sized GPS.
I live in Utah and frequently hike in an area without any cell phone service and the IPAD with GPS has changed my whole way of enjoying the wilderness. I have an app with all of Utah’s topo maps loaded, and once I pick a route, my wife and I are to the trailhead, then off the trail. We can wander through meadow and valley with certainty as the App keeps our topo map updated with our orientation and location. Of course we can see the mountains to know our way back if it fails, but we can connect all the clearings and traverses in a path of least resistance.
I guess I'm just a stickler for the precise use of the English language.
That is very cool. Which model do you have? And does it come with 3g or is it one of the ones with no cell service?
Yes but...10 million minutes is just over 19 years. The iPhone hasn't been on the market for 19 years.
The sucker birth rate appears to have increased since Barnum’s time...
Clean the lent out of his pockets? You got something against Catholics?
More than likely you are just get irritated by the stupid use of the language.
If you want a precise language, you might consider learning German or Russian...
IIRC, in addition to using WiFi for a more accurate fix, the iOS devices use it to generate a preliminary position estimate while it’s waiting for GPS, which can be relatively slow in comparison (up to 15-20 seconds or so).
I'm still ticked off at Toshiba for selling secrets to the Soviets.
LOL! What's "Atari"? Was he hanging out with Tron?
The thing I'm pissed about at this point is Apple costing me something like $400 by marketing a product which couldn't make it to the two year ATT trade-up point, in fact it didn't even make it to the end of one year.
There’s quite a difference between treasonous military betrayal vs typical business hardball.
Complex products built by the millions have an occasional lemon.
Did you go to Apple about it?
“I think he would be better of with a pay phone”
Quite. HE thinks he’d be better off with a pay phone: “I was getting into too much trouble from not being able to find pay phones which basically stopped existing around that time. I mean, superman never had to look more than 30 feet for a phone booth to change in, but he’d go crazy now.”
This was the fourth or fifth time the thing had done this and Apple's normal mode of operation is to have the customer make an appointment to be seen two or three days hence and I simply cannot afford to be off the air for two or three days at a stretch on that regular a basis. Previously I'd been able to fix the headphone-hole thing with compressed air and/or by using speaker phone until the problem went away, this time that did not work. The one experience I'd had taking the phone back to Apple was for a dead battery.
There are plenty of reasons not to like Apple, there’s no doubt about that. That just struck me as a really weird reason.
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