Why Apple computers suck for business
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 11:21AM 
Liverpool Apple StoreI've been using macs in my business for some years now but the shortcomings of Apple's offering were never clear to me until last week when my iMac hard disk died. It's my main business machine and while my data was safely on external drives I still needed a powerful computer to actually do my job (mainly video production). I've had 2 iMacs and both have had internal hard disks die within 2 years of purchase. On the first iMac I fixed it myself - I'm originally a pc guy so I thought 'how hard can it be?'. Silly me. I got it done but for my next iMac, my current one, I bought AppleCare thinking it would be easier to get Apple to take care of any problems. I was very wrong.
First of all I booked a genius bar appointment at my nearest store which is not all that near to be honest, in the Trafford centre in Manchester. I drove up there (40 mins drive) and they confirmed what I already knew - SMART was reporting that the disk was failing. They told me they didn't have the part in stock and that it would take 5-7 days to get the work done. Not good - I have customers waiting on me to deliver. So we called around and found that the Liverpool One store had the part in stock. Ok I say, let's go. It's another long drive and Liverpool traffic is a bitch but finally I get there and I'm politely dealt with - even being taken up to the inconveniently located genius bar in the staff lift because I'm carrying an extremely heavy and sharp edged 27" iMac. No surprises - they can't fix it there and then. 3-5 days I'm told. Disappointing when you consider they have the part, the tools and my computer all in the same place. It crosses my mind that if they'd give me some desk space I could just do it myself. But no, I am well behaved and I go home. Another long drive in heavy traffic - nearly 2 hours. I hate to think how much I've spent in petrol up to his point. Nearly as much as the cost of a new hard drive. Considerably more if you factor in the cost to the environment and a whole day of my time.
I leave the Apple guys alone for the whole of the next day, Tuesday, only occasionally looking at my empty desk and fretting about the lost work time. But on Wednesday the lack of productivity and a weird sense of responsibility towards my customers forces me to call Liverpool to ask where they're up to with my machine. You have.. 5.. calls ahead of you in the queue. The girl who eventually answers is polite but resolute in her unwillingness to give me any idea when the work will be complete. Her best estimate is the same 3-5 days I was originally told. Here's the thing, though. When I was told that, I was hoping Apple liked to under promise and over deliver. I needed my computer and I needed it NOW. I literally had nothing I could do without it except hassle the Apple store folks. So that's what I did. After being cut off and calling again (you have.. 4.. calls ahead of you in the queue) I speak to the same lady and she tells me that she's spoken to the staff the back and my computer will be fixed today. Great! I tell her I'm driving up and I'll wait in the store until it's done. Yes I know that's going to put pressure on the store staff. That's the idea.
So I make the long drive to Liverpool again.. More petrol, another lost day of productivity, more high blood pressure. And I deal with the guys in the store. The chap running the genius bar is annoyed with me but keeps his cool and after some cajoling he nudges the guys in the back. They promise they're now working on it. I drink coffee in Starbucks - getting out of his hair for 30 mins is my little reward to him for his compliance. Eventually I go back to the store and almost another hour later my computer is brought out. I force a smile, thank the staff for putting up with me and head home. It's another long drive and I arrive only just in time to pick up the kids from nursery. Another day is lost and all of that night and half of the next day will be taken up reinstalling but at least my destiny is back in my own hands. I resolve never to give away that control again.
So here's the problem. Apple are rightly proud of their customer service. The staff interpersonal skills are superb. That makes dealing with Apple a very smooth ride but where the rubber meets the road is getting the damn computer fixed. Apple performs very poorly indeed on this point. What matters to me as a business when my computer has failed, especially when I've paid extra for AppleCare (my colleague jokingly suggested that perhaps I'd inadvertently purchased AppleDontCare) is that my computer is fixed fast so I can get back to work.
I lost most of Sunday, all of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and half of Thursday to this failure and it was only that quick because I bothered and cajoled the Apple staff. If I'd not done so I would have waited even longer. I also paid a crap ton of money in petrol and invested a lot of my own time driving around. Compare this experience with how I would have handled this failure in a PC. All I would have done there is driven to PC World, overpaid for a new SATA drive and then replaced it myself. Total lost time - 1 day tops. Even with AppleCare paying for the drive and the manpower this was much more expensive than simply swapping a drive in a PC.
Consider that business proposition again - if I had a PC I would have paid less for the computer, less for the drive, less for the petrol and I would have been back to work in 1 day instead of 4. Tell me again how great your premium price Apple solution is?
What I've described here isn't extraordinary - a disk died, they replaced it. Nothing went wrong particularly aside from the disk itself. If anything they went faster than they typically would - because I nagged them. And yet I still consider their performance apalling. Apple don't seem to be aware of what matters to business. Paying extra for AppleCare gets you no special treatment. They don't appear to have anything like the necessary infrastructure for repairing stuff quickly and getting businesses back to work. As a result I'm considering switching away from Final Cut and onto to Premiere so that I can use PCs again. Premiere is way too expensive but the overall risk to my business is considerably less than sticking with Apple.
General tagged apple business, apple repair, apple store, business, cusomer service, final cut, liverpool, mac repair, macs, premiere, slow, sme
Reader Comments (24)
I never rely on insurance services (which is what Apple Care is at the end of the day), but look after myself. I have a machine I can 'get by' on if my main one is incapacitated, basically a second machine used by someone else. At best, Apple Care would be ship in (1 day), fix (1 day) and return (1 day). that would have avoided petrol costs, but would still take three days.
I've spent far more time "maintaining" Windows than I have lost to hardware failures with Apple kit. That's why I switched in the first place. Also, migrating to a new computer is a doddle, not the pain of re-installing software, serial numbers etc. that it is with Windows.
When I had the power supply die on an out-of-warranty MacPro that didn't have Apple Care, my support experience was this: I called up Apple Care, they told me there was nothing they could do for me as the computer was long out of warranty and I hadn't purchased Apple Care.
Also there was no Apple Store anywhere near me.
They gave me a few addresses of Apple partners though and I called one up and made an appointment for a few days later. I had the luxury of having a MacBook Pro which I could continue to work on. What also helped me was that I run a nightly mirror of the root disk to an external USB drive, using Super Duper. This way I could simply unplug the cloned system drive and boot off of it on the MacBook Pro.
Replacing a dead hard drive in a Mac Pro is a matter of seconds, which is why I'm still hesitant to use an iMac due to its bad repairability score. Your story just confirmed this.
I have a Macbook pro but it's not up to the job of running Final Cut Pro X. It's not old - only a couple of years. But it has the wrong video card, nVidia instead of ATI. If I stick with Apple I'll be looking at a Mac Pro next time. That's assuming they keep making them. It's not at all clear to me whether they'll refresh the Mac Pro or discontinue them.
I have a 27" iMac here too, just over 2 years old and also covered with Apple Care. Wonderful machine, good performance, pretty darned good monitor and best of all Mac OS X. It's a simple job to upgrade or replace memory, but they have made it STUPIDLY difficult to replace the hard drive, and what is the single most likely component to fail of any computer? Yes, exactly.
To replace the HDD you have to remove that 27" display and it's certainly not the trivial task that it should be to replace a failed disk. Ok, I'm not relying on my iMac for my livelihood like you are John, but I still see that as the biggest weakness of this machine and to be honest just about any Apple machine short of the Mac Pro.
And this is the single reason why I'm wondering which direction I should go in when this iMac finally bites the dust. I rely on Lightroom and to a much lesser extent Photoshop. With those two products you have to be running on either Mac OS or Windows. I really don't want to go back to Windows after 6 years of enjoying the stability of OS X. I'd be happy to go back to building my own PC and throwing Linux on it - but no Lightroom or Photoshop under Linux (unless you want to look at solutions such as Wine or Crossover which may just about run older Windows versions to some extent).
I've been looking at Linux native alternatives to both packages for quite a while now, but so far I've been left unimpressed. That might change by the time it comes to the crunch, I'll be keeping a close eye on the situation.
But it could be, sadly, that I will land back in the world of Windows, however much I would rather be using OS X. I can build a machine the way I want it built, using the components I think will do the best job for me and critically when something goes wrong it will be cheap and easy to sort it out. You should not have to go to those lengths to get a disk swapped out when you paid for an extended warranty. Buy a Dell or an HP and they'll come and fix it at your home for less money than Apple charge for Apple Care. A premium price paid for a "premium product" should deliver a "premium service".
Thanks for the lengthy and reasoned reply Chris. I just want to respond on one small point. You mentioned Lightroom and Photoshop being tied to one OS or the other. That's true with Photoshop but a Lightroom license actually gets you both Mac and Windows versions. So switching from PC to Mac or back is easy with Lightroom. Not so for Photoshop. Adobe will do discounts for switchers but not big discounts.
I actually think that this sort of portability problem is one of the big pressures on expensive software like Photoshop. People don't want to be stuck unable to switch platform. When software is much cheaper it's a lot less painful to switch platform and re-buy the apps you know you'll use.
If being able to easily/quickly replace internal components (hard drive) is important, you could have opted for a Mac Pro instead of an iMac. Maybe a little more expensive (and maybe a little faster) but internal components are very easily replaced (certainly as easy as a PC) and you can still run Mac OS X.
Also, my AppleCare included onsite repair for desktops, but that is over here in the states, I have no idea how it is in the UK.
To be honest it s a lot easier now that we have Apple stores around the country. A few years ago it was much harder.
Robert - I'm far from convinced that Mac Pros have a future. They're long past due for a product refresh. They were expensive before but with the old hardware specs and remaining high prices they're worse value now than they've ever been. If Apple refreshes them and recommits to the product I'll consider getting a Mac Pro.
Kev - I'm a recent enough convert to Macs that I don't remember a time without Apple stores. But Im sure you're right things were even harder then.
Hi john, sorry to say this but Apple does not care about business. I spent 30k in one day on buying apple hardware for our business and got no better service than a 12 year old buying a ipod. I am yet to go an apple store with out having a poor experience, I always end up writing a formal complaint to them. The 'business' sales people are even worse .. few have any idea of business and only want hype up the latest products. I have had enough of complaining! Yes we have a company full of iphones/ipads/mac books, mac book pro's/mac pros and mac mini's .. and do you what.. we have given in .. we are now only buy Dell and Samsung and have switched all but a few apple products to windows 7 and testing windows 8.
I have had similar experiences with apple repair people, the best was when I forgot to get an appointment and was told I had to take mac home again and bring it in another day when I did have one.. even though they were a. Quiet and b. I had the full diagnostics for the problem for them. I hope your customers understood.. unfortunately our wouldn't.
Si
I work for a third party Apple certified Reseller in the states. Its appalling to me that it takes that long to get a part in Europe. If a customer brings in a computer before noon we can have the part in the shop by the next morning. After the part is here I can swap it out in any mac in less than 30min (usually less) baring any data migration. If they get it to us after noon it only takes an extra day to get it. Our turn around time is 72 hours or less.
In the future though I would recommend having a three tier back up solution for your business. It will make things go much smoother when a HDD goes out. Notice I said when not if. All HDD will eventually fail eventually.
The first tier should be Time Machine. Its easy and it comes with every mac. Time machine will make incremental back ups every hour so you have a fail safe if you accidentally delete some thing or a file gets corrupted.
The second tier should be a replica of your system disk, either an external clone with a scheduled block cloner program like super duper or carbon copy cloner. Or if you have a mac pro a mirrored RAID 1 volume with one or more internal disks, (I have a three drive mirror in mine). This way you have a grace period where work can get done while you are waiting for the part to arrive. Just boot from the mirrored disk. As well as being able to dump the mirror to the new drive when it gets installed. You can continue to use the disk while this is happening.
The third tier should be an off site back up either by a cloud service or swapping back up drives every week with at a friend or relatives home.
While I'm still appalled at how long it takes for repairs in europe. AppleCare is no replacement for having a proper clone and back up when your business is on the line.
This solution works on any work station PC, Mac, or Linux. So don't blame the manufacture just be better prepared next time.
It seems to me that your main grievance here, John, is with AppleCare, which is a consumer product. Perhaps you were mis-sold this product, as Apple offer something called ProCare which is meant for business customers, and offers priority repairs. There is also a thriving ecosystem of independent authorised repair companies that offer the level of service you would like to receive.
Another aspect touched on is the serviceability and resiliency of the iMac models. Again these are designed to be consumer products, so maybe you were mis-sold in this respect too.
One last observation: always consider retaining a standby machine (even if it slower and smaller) on which you can complete your work should your primary machine fail.
Patrick - Thanks for the USA perspective. Your advice, while correct, has little to do with the situation I faced. I didn't lose any data and I'd actually rather reinstall from a clean system than restore from a time machine backup. That way I don't have to reinstall the detritus I no longer use. All my actual data was on external drives and the critical parts are backed up in 2 other places - one online. So be careful about suggesting that the problem was my fault or that I could have been better prepared. I was very well prepared to avoid losing data. My mistake was trusting that Apple would take my hardware failure as seriously as I do.
Simon - Have you looked at the cost of ProCare? If it's the product I'm thinking of it's £300 and covers up to 5 computers. Not really appropriate to my 1 computer and overly expensive. It does offer loaner machines while your main machine is being fixed. Honestly, though, I find that idea a little worrying. Does that mean that business customer repairs take as long as consumer repairs? Long enough that even after taking the time to install all your data and apps on the loaner machine you'd have time to get useful work done before getting your own machine back? Not a comforting thought.
As for whether the iMac is a consumer or business grade computer - I've addressed earlier the question of whether the Mac Pro has a future but I think Apple might be a little upset by the suggestion that the iMac isn't meant to be reliable enough for business. I think one of their strongest claims is for the quality and reliability of Macs - ALL Macs. As for your suggestion that Apple business users should keep a whole standby computer - I find that laughable. Apple computers are very expensive. Your solution to a broken hard drive is that I should buy TWO expensive computers? Please..
oomph sorry to hear of your troubles John. Are solid state drives more reliable?
Thanks Rob. Interesting question that one. Yes they're more reliable in cases of bumps and probably heat - they don't generate as much heat as a spinning magnetic drive. But they do definitely wear out. There is a limit to how many times an SSD can be written to and read from, though with typical usage patterns the expected lifespan of an SSD is still longer than that of a typical PC. But SSDs haven't been around as long as spinning magnetic drives - so who can really tell yet? In any case the limited size of an SSD makes it's uses more limited than a spinning disk.
I'm fudging quite a lot in this reply. If I had to choose a yes or no answer I'd say yes - I think they're generally more reliable.
Hi John. I've "stumbled" on to your webpage through Flare Presets, but that's another story. I am, however, very bemused by your experience with Apple and their products.
I rely (too?) heavily on my MacBook Pro for photographic work, mainly restoring and archiving fragile and volatile glass negatives from the turn of the last century, early 1930's and the post-war years. I have an ever expanding hard drive of irreplaceable and valuable man hours. I'm backed-up with Time Machine, but also, and more critically, have three storage and back-up sources with one off-site, one bootable cloned drive and Amazon S2 storage, plus an old G4 stored and frequently updated. This all costs me money, time and the discipline that is commensurate with my work. I have had hard drive failures and various other minor tech problem with my MacBook, and it is my responsibility to keep these back-ups in the event of such mechanical and human infallibility.
Your experiences with Apple retail are unusual, and like Patrick from the States says, I've never myself experienced the difficulties you've encountered and you should feel rightly irritated by the timescale they offered, even with AppleCare under your belt, but they too are not infallible. Perhaps I'm fortunate to live in London and have easy access to two excellent Apple Stores and three knowledgeable authorised Apple Service Centres. The Genius Bars are really for "passing trade" and, in my opinion, not for such situations as you found yourself in. Yet it still comes down to being prepared for critical hardware failure, especially if it is your sole source of income. No matter whom the manufacturer of your equipment is there is always going to be some "system down" time and I have learned that from very bitter and expensive experience.
Thanks Lawrence. Remember, I didn't lose and data. Like you I have multiple backups including more than one off site. My complaint was nothing to do with backups. My problem is that it was going to take a week to do a very simple repair. Swapping a hd on a pc is the work of a few minutes. Apple doesnt seem to understand that businesses can't be be put on hold for a week. I've since spoken to a store manager and business specialist from Apple and that has only reinforced my view that they have nothing to offer a small business like mine.
Your back up strategy is actually part of the problem. Where is the block level cloned drive that you can boot to in an emergency? If you had a block level clone you wouldn't have had any down time. Check out supper duper and carbon copy cloner. Your internal HDD goes bad? No problem reboot to your clone and continue working till the new part arrives. Its that simple. (in extremely rare situations a bad internal hdd can prevent booting from an external drive).
Granted a block level system disk clone would allow me to boot off the backup and keep working but at some point I would still have to take my iMac to the apple store (which is a hell of a long way away btw) and then leave it with them for up to a week while they replace the internal drive. There is no business support option that gets this repair done faster.
I think we're going circles a bit now. I'm aware of procare but it covers 5 computers I think and costs £300. Not appropriate for me with only 1 business critical machine. It's not meant for 1 man businesses and Apple don't have a service that is. Besides, one of Procare's features is loan machines - which is laughably ill conceived. By the time I'd got everything I need installed on the loaner my real machine would be fixed and I'd have to do the whole thing again. To be honest I'm not impressed even with Apple's pro service offerings. I just don't think Apple understands what business needs.
The only "industrial strength" machine is the mac pro which is stupidly expensive and woefully out of date. Besides don't
Apple pride themselves on the quality of their hardware? I'm not sure Apple would agree with your suggestion that the iMac isn't suitable for business.
As for keeping a spare machine - that's kinda ridiculous considering how expensive Apple computers are. I do actually have a macbook pro laptop which is only a couple of years old but because Apple chose not to support nVidia graphics chipsets in Final Cut Pro X it's too slow to be useful as a standby machine. I've got to say I'm pretty annoyed that my nice shiny recent Macbook pro has been left out in the cold like that.
Coincidently I have just returned from holiday keen to get my photos loaded on to my iMac only to face a warning that my hard disk is starting to fail. It is entirely a personal computer so not business critical but I am apprehensive about my first experience of the apple genius/after care. I have to agree though with one of the previous comments:I like many others turned to Apple, and paid our Apple tax premium for kit that is infinitely superior quality in every way. In the 7 years I've used Apple products I've had one iMac screen failure, and this is the first hard drive failure. So the inconvenience I'm no doubt about to experience with having to travel to an Apple store miles away, an x-day turnaround etc. still averages out far better than any Windows PC I've used in the years before.
Interestingly MacBreak Weekly recently analysed the latest US TV ad campaign for Apple. This focused on e genius. Leo et al reckoned that they were emphasising the after sales care benefits. I'm guessing you'd be quick to disagree, however, from the comments already made by others I suspect the resource available in the UK is a fraction of what is available at home in the US so levels of service are well behind. To be fair to Apple, if things don't break down much, they're not going to employ a lot of people to sit around waiting to do repairs. Not sure why they wouldn't do a loan replacement arrangement though to keep you going...
Hope your blood pressure has returned to normal......
Thanks for the comment. I think Apple actually believe their customer support is excellent. They didn't seem to understand my criticism at all. All the people I spoke to had totally drunk the cool aid and were sold on the idea that Apple customer care was great and wonderful and couldn't be improved. I regard this as a naive "blind spot" for Apple. They have quite a few of those and ultimately I think it'll hurt their business for IOS too. It's arrogance really.
For what it's worth I agree that the hardware is superb. Though out of the two iMacs I've owned both have had hard drive failures.
I think what offended me most about this run in wasn't just the fact that they gave poor support. It was that they behaved as though they were giving *great* support and that I should be grateful.
I have never liked Apple computers. They are always at least a year behind in their technology. The day Sandy bridge was released (January 2011) for sell I ordered an MSI motherboard and and a I7CPU, Two SSD's two 3TB regular hard drives a Heat-sink the size of a small flat along with a GTX570 video card a 27" ISP Monitor 16GB of ram and within a week I had my rig running stable as a rock overclocked at 4.4GHz running Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3. By placing the OS on one SSD with the page file, and the Adobe programs and scratch file on the other I' boot Windows 7 in less than 30 seconds and I can generate a full frame --I have a 21 m-pixel sensor-- HDR file in about 20 seconds starting with full resolution RAW files. That was over two years ago. The current MAC-Pro workstation sports the Xeon E5645 which was released February 2011 and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 which was released in September of 2009 is its top end video card. And for these antiquated parts you pay a premium? What the bleep for? (Excuse the dangling participle). See http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html.
I work in Cupertino California where Apple is headquartered and I would never pay good money for one of their antique toys!
Cory Doctorow had some interesting things to say about computers over at Lifehacker recently that might interest you:
My only experience with Thinkpads is one I got in 1998 that, amazingly, still work (albeit with a stripped-down Ubuntu distro). Never had any reason to have them work on it, though, I just replaced the network card that went bad and pulled out the battery after a few years. Other than that, it's a beast.
Thanks for pointing me at that article J.P.! It's a really interesting read and I think Cory gets it dead right. And Thinkpads are legendary. I might be a little biased about IBM. My dad was an IBMer and he indoctrinated me with how much he loved the company. Even now, when it's really not the company it was, I still have very positive feelings towards IBM.