Support letdowns tarnish Apple’s sterling quality

A petition has been circulating for nine months demanding that Apple fix what seems to be a defect in its 2011 MacBook Pros. As the 10,000 folks who’ve signed the petition know, these laptops have an unusual failure of the graphics processor unit, which causes the Mac to stop working. The usual fix is a $300 motherboard replacement — paid for by the user. Shouldn’t Apple own up and recall them, or at least cover failed units at no charge?

My sad tale about failing MacBook Pro GPUs But in usual Apple fashion, the company has said nothing. My own MacBook Pro failed last September due to this glitch, and I paid the $300 plus tax to fix it, as my warranty had expired 18 months earlier. Luck of the draw, I figured, not knowing I might be caught up in a wider phenomenon.

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The Apple Store service was great, as usual. No surprise: Consumer Reports’ buyer surveys show no manufacturer gets anywhere close to Apple in terms of customer satisfaction for after-sales support. Apple is simply the best for support.

However, that replacement motherboard’s GPU failed seven months later, four months after its warranty expired. This time, the Apple Store replaced it at no charge, though it never acknowledged the issue might be a known one. I was also told the free fix was not something I could count on in the future; it was at the store’s discretion this time because such a quick failure was unusual.

Apple also replaced my MacBook Pro’s LCD screen at no charge because a tech in the Texas facility that fixes older MacBooks noticed some dead pixels — ones I never caught — when he tested the MacBook after replacing the motherboard. I was happy that Apple was so proactive in making the repair, free of charge. But I’m not happy that my graphics processor failure should’ve been handled by Apple gratis the first time — and done so openly.

To be sure, you don’t see PC makers act any different; the only recalls you see involve safety issues where federal consumer-protection law kicks in, typically around battery and power cord fires. But the MacBook Pro is a premium product from a premium company.

As is typical, Apple did not respond to InfoWorld’s request for its policy on how it handles out-of-warranty products with unusual failure rates, nor for comment on this specific issue, even privately. Secrecy and silence are how Apple operates.

The real issue: A pattern of not saying what’s really going on The MacBook Pro issue is hardly the first occurrence of unusual defects that affect many people yet go unacknowledged by Apple. The battery-charging circuitry in 2008 MacBooks seems to have a flaw that kills the battery’s ability to hold a charge after only a year; luckily the battery is removable and can be easily replaced. Not so lucky were owners of 2006 iMacs, whose LCD screens seemed to have atypical defect rates — requiring expensive CD screen replacements on the user’s dime.

In both cases, I say “seem” because I don’t know if there’s actually a defect that Apple has publicly ignored, or if the issues are the usual percentage of failures any technology product has, with the disproportionate attention paid due to the more-demanding expectations of Mac buyers. With no information from Apple, there’s no way to know.

We all remember 2010’s iPhone 4 antenna issue, where the device’s design meant that a conventional way a user might hold it would affect the radio’s ability to receive and send signals. It was one of those design defects that didn’t become apparent until real-world use, but we all remember CEO Steve Jobs’ famous retort: “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

The company eventually offered free bumper cases to keep users’ fingers away from the radio, but we all got a very public look at how Apple won’t come clean if it doesn’t have to. We see the same phenomenon for operating system updates: Issues are unacknowledged until they are fixed, if they are fixed. I get that for security issues — why publicize a vulnerability users can do nothing about until it’s resolved? — but not for other matters.

Apple isn’t always so reticent. Two years ago, Apple came clean about issues with Apple Maps, but that’s one of the few times it has done so. And this past Friday, it announced a battery-replacement program for some iPhone 5 devices sold between September 2012 and January 2013, where the batteries aren’t holding their charges as long as they should.

I wish I knew the secret to Apple stepping in to solve an issue and stepping aside as unimportant or too rare to worry about.

High standards — and prices — lead to high service expectations Ironically, Apple’s reputation for quality — and the high price you pay to get it — makes the silence worse. One reason is that the silence lets conspiracy theories breed and grow. The other is that, well, we pay dearly for a computer that is better than a typical PC, and we expect better care when that promised better quality stumbles.

We don’t have hard numbers, but we have plenty of customer surveys — including Consumer Reports’ — that show Apple’s hardware is of better quality, more reliable, and less prone to defects than other PCs. Of course, most PCs cost less than half as much as a Mac, showing you get what you pay for. Some PCs are shockingly bad: Once a quality leader, Dell’s product quality plunged in the 2000s, for example, leading several companies and government agencies to stop buying them due to horrendous failure rates.

The Mac quality difference isn’t merely because a $1,500 MacBook Pro has better parts and design than a $600 Dell. My own company gives employees a choice between Macs and Lenovo PCs. The IT folks say the Lenovos have good quality, which they should because they’re within $100 of the price of a MacBook. Still, the Macs are more durable, last longer, and fail less. It’s the difference between good and very good. The extra $100 buys a computer that is operationally cheaper than the PCs, so the Macs actually are cheaper by hundreds of dollars each over the total ownership period.

But when a Mac has an issue, the IT folks grit their teeth because they don’t trust Apple to be upfront about defects — and it rarely is. Yes, the Apple Store will handle the repair, and life goes on swimmingly after that. But doubt lingers because IT knows about petitions such as the one involving the 2011 MacBook Pros.

At the end of the day, I know I will get a superior product from Apple 95 percent of the time — based on my experience owning a bevy of Apple products over the years. But I also know when that 5 percent situation comes up, I’ll get friendly service from the Apple Store — at my expense, even if there’s a lurking defect.

If I had a PC with similar issues, I’d likely get nothing. I’ve certainly experienced that reality, as have colleagues. Never mind that our IT folks have had its PC repair service deny claims using trumped-up accusations of user abuse. (I’ve inspected some of the claimed user damage, and it simply wasn’t there.) Support boards are full of complaints from PC customers unhappy about perceived lack of responsibility on the part of PC makers.

But we expect more from Apple than others, fairly or not. In the case of repairs, unfairly: The same Consumer Reports surveys that show buyers love Apple’s support also show that Apple’s ability to fix computer hardware issues is no better than that of its PC competitors. When it comes to repair results, you don’t get more from Apple, though they need fewer repairs.

Apple makes great products and has truly outstanding customer service, but it also sets the customer relationship on its own terms, which can become evasive if something goes amiss. If a colleague took credit for what he did well but went silent when something went wrong — not blaming others but not owning up — you’d probably lose respect for that person pretty quickly. Such pathological lack of responsibility undermines the whole relationship.

Apple portrays itself as not the typical computer company. That may not be as true as we’d like to believe. It’s great until it isn’t. Because Apple so often is great, we really notice when it isn’t.

This article, “Support letdowns tarnish Apple’s sterling quality,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.