2005 June | The Mac Night Owl

Archive for June, 2005

The Sad State of Technical Support: Take Two

Saturday, June 25th, 2005

My comment about the horrible condition of technical support these days clearly struck a nerve. You readers have plenty of horror stories to relate and the situation continues to get worse. Fortunately, you aren’t locked into the manufacturer to get help. There are alternatives that may be far better for you, and it’s clear that, where market opportunities appear, smart people will try to fill them.

Most of you know the name Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus, but unless you’ve heard the news on The Tech Night Owl LIVE and elsewhere, you may not realize that he does more than write books these days. The doctor has put together a new company, Doctor Mac Consulting, which provides, at a price of course, professional caliber technical help and training covering the Mac, Mac OS X and your favorite applications. There’s also a rich and growing section at Bob’s site offering free help on common troubleshooting issues. No, the doctor and his talented crew don’t make house calls, at least not yet, but they do guarantee that if they don’t help you solve your problem, you won’t have to pay for the service.

If you live in North Texas, you can call on Dru Richman and his crew at the Mac Help Desk for Mac advice and training. This company, being regional in nature, specializes in on-site support and can also repair your Mac. Richman is one of thousands of skilled professionals who are members of the Apple Consultant’s Network. And if you’re lucky to live in a city with an Apple Store nearby, you can come by and visit Genius Bar, but the service is essentially limited to Apple hardware and software. The stores do, however, run workshops and seminars covering Adobe Photoshop and other products.

But it’s not just computer users who are forced to suffer technical support woes. Even such basic consumer electronic devices as a TV set have taken on new features that often make them difficult to install properly. You can’t just plug them in and turn them on to get the best possible picture, and the bewildering array of setup options and increasingly dense manuals do not help. So retailers are getting into the act to fill the gaps.

Best Buy, the large American chain of consumer electronics outlets, has established a network known as the “Geek Squad” that can field support calls on a 24/7 basis, provide in-store repairs and make house calls. The squad currently has a staff of 8,000 spread across the landscape, and another 4,000 will be added over the coming year. You’ll recognize the Geek Squad on the job by their fleet of custom-painted Volkswagen New Beetles.

As CompUSA expands its product line beyond personal computers and peripherals, it has also beefed up its support team, promising next-day appointments if you need a house call. In addition, a growing number of online consumer electronics dealers provide direct help via phone, so you don’t have to cope with the varying support policies of a variety of manufacturers when troubles arise.

Understand that I haven’t tested these services, so I can’t vouch for their quality and responsiveness, but it’s clear where the real fault lies, and that’s the manufacturers who continue to build products that mere mortals cannot master. What’s the advantage of having dozens of powerful features when you need a technology degree to figure out how they work? One of Apple’s big advantages is that its products tend to be easier to use than the competition, but easier does not mean easy. Despite its advantages over Windows, many parts of Mac OS X remain difficult to use. There are still instances where you are forced to enter the dark world of the command line to fix some problems, although, to be fair, there are often shareware alternatives that promise to put a friendly, accessible face on many of Mac OS X’s built-in maintenance features.

Alas, the disease of creeping complexity has spread through a variety of products. Sure, you can pretty well figure out the basics of making and receiving a call on a mobile phone in a few minutes. But navigating the setup menus for the first time can be a frightening experience, and the product manuals seldom provide any illumination.

If you want to take solace in the fact that you can just drive off in the family vehicle with little fuss or bother, think again. Auto makers have also succumbed to the feature add-on game, and you can’t always depend on just putting in the key and firing up the engine to get going. More and more vehicles, and not just the luxury models, have keyless ignition systems. You only need to have the key fob in your pocket or purse, and you can push a button to start the engine. That doesn’t seem so difficult, but take a look at the radio and climate control system and see if you can figure it all out without cracking upon the manual or calling on the dealer for help.

A few weeks ago, for example, I observed a new owner of a Mini Cooper being shown the ins and outs of this popular cult car while visiting a local dealership. I caught a few snatches of conversation here and there, and it was clear that many of the features required special training before it was safe for the new owner to be allowed on the open road. The Mini’s parent company, BMW, has become notorious for its iDrive, a computerized navigation system that goes a long way towards making even simple functions as tuning the radio a complicated chore.

Yes, it’s great to know that more and more entrepreneurs are entering the technical support game, and I wish them well. But if the companies who build sophisticated technology into their products made a good faith effort to make them user friendly, you wouldn’t need outside help to operate these contraptions.

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The Apple/Intel Report: Should Apple Cut Prices?

Saturday, June 25th, 2005

The other day, I wrote to an online columnist who, in a supreme fit of ignorance, suggested that you should hold off purchasing new Macs until the new models with Intel chips appear. Since I once worked for the same company he did, I thought he’d have the courtesy to respond, but I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. No matter. The real issue is whether or not Mac users will listen.

It’s probably far too early to see if there’s going to be any impact on sales, and I have little doubt Apple is watching the situation carefully. At the same time, maybe it’s a good time for a smart, preemptive strike, one that would ensure decent sales of new Macs and make you think twice about waiting.

In other words, cut the prices.

Now it’s obvious that price cuts reduce profits and shareholders might object strenuously. On the other hand, Apple has a huge war chest of cash on hand, and it can withstand a few quarters of reduced profits without hurting the company. The problem, as you probably realize, is one of psychology, and it explains Apple’s reluctance to announce new products prematurely. If you know that something better is close at hand, you might put off purchasing the current model, or wait until the new one appears to take advantage of the inevitable closeout sales on older stock.

If logic prevailed, and it seldom does, it would be clear to one and all that it doesn’t really matter what kind of chip it puts into new Macs a year or two down the pike. You know there will always be something faster on the horizon, and if you kept waiting for something better, you’d never buy a new computer. There will never be a point where Apple or any other PC maker will simply decree that there will never be a newer model unless the company is about to go out of business.

Carrying logic to the next step, the Mac you buy with Intel Inside a year or two from now will, aside from the normal exterior design updates, still be a Mac. It will still run Mac OS X. If anything, the transition won’t exactly be seamless. There’s no present indication that Apple plans to offer some sort of Classic environment for applications that predate Mac OS X. The Rosetta emulation technology that lets you run PowerPC software evidently won’t deliver that support. So if you depend on those older applications, and there is no Mac OS X equivalent, you may, in fact, be better off grabbing a Mac with PowerPC before they go out of style.

What’s more, even though it appears that developers are not having a terribly difficult time recompiling their applications to run as Universal Binaries, to run on both PowerPC and Intel, there are going to be bumps along the way. If a developer didn’t use Apple’s Xcode to build those programs, they will have to be brought into the new programming environment first. Maybe it’ll take a few weeks, maybe it’ll take a few months, and maybe some companies will decide not to make the investment until real Macs with Intel processors actually appear.

It’s also inevitable that the first Macs with the new chips might have bugs of one sort or another that won’t be massaged out of the system for a while. Sure, Apple has clearly taken great care to make the transition as seamless as possible, but let’s not forget that the chips Apple plans to use have not been released yet. Version 1.0 of anything tends to have unexpected issues. In the auto industry, it’s often a good idea to wait for the second year of a new model’s lifecycle to escape possible early production and reliability issues.

If anything, it may be a good idea to be cautious about buying the first Mactels, to use the new vernacular for such devices. Wait for others to become the early adopters, and watch the reactions on your favorite Mac troubleshooting sites to be sure there are no show-stopping problems before you buy one. This is particularly true if your Mac is a business tool. In fact, I rather suspect Apple will have to keep some PowerPC models in production longer than they want just to satisfy the needs of companies who are reluctant to take a gamble on a new, unproven architecture.

At the same time, I’m sure it won’t stop some of you from setting aside your purchase plans. Sure, it’s probably too early to gauge the impact, but if Apple begins a slow and steady program of price reductions, it will help fuel sales of existing models. What’s more, as new models with PowerPC chips appear, Apple ought to make an especially big deal about the new features, whatever they may be, to help divert attention, so that the arrival of the Mactels will not seem so important.

And, except for the psychological impact, the switch to Intel shouldn’t be that big a deal. Unfortunately it is, and the situation isn’t being helped when some technology commentators continue to stumble over facts and logic.

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