In the wake of bad press, angry customers, and government concern, Verizon decides not to charge a $2 fee for one-time online payments after all. My gut reaction on Twitter:
When Verizon says it won't charge $2 for online payments, it's saying it'll get $2 out of you in some less obvious manner. Some victory.—
Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) December 30, 2011
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f you received an email recently telling you that you would be receiving a Walmart gift card or cash equivalent as part of the corporation’s settlement in a class action lawsuit alleging that Walmart and Netflix illegally worked together to fix DVD rental or purchase prices, then I’m afraid there’s some bad news: It probably won’t amount to enough to rent a DVD (or buy a coffee, for that matter), and there’s no more where it came from.
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 11:37 am on Sunday, July 18, 2010
At Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference on Friday morning, Steve Jobs included PCWorld’s ranking of the handset as the top smartphone in his list of iPhone 4 achievements. But Jobs’ presentation and the measures Apple is taking to respond to the antenna controversy didn’t leave my former coworkers at PCW confident that its original recommendation had been validated.
Actually, they found the latest developments so lackluster that they bumped the iPhone 4 off the chart entirely. Its rating is now “pending,” and HTC’s EVO 4G is the #1 phone. (The iPhone 3GS remains on the chart, in the #8 slot.)
Consumer Reports on Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference–sounds like Steve Jobs didn’t convince them that the iPhone 4 has no unique issues:
Consumers deserve answers and fairness. Providing free bumpers and cases is a good first step toward Apple identifying and finding a solution for the signal-loss problem of the iPhone 4.
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 11:26 am on Friday, July 16, 2010
(Photo borrowed from Engadget’s live coverage.)
So much for the theory that Apple was going to announce a miracle cure for iPhone 4 reception issues this morning. At the press conference on Apple’s campus, Steve Jobs offered several measures to make current and prospective iPhone 4 owners comfortable with their purchase–but he defended the iPhone 4 against charges that it has unique problems with reception, and didn’t say that Apple could or would eliminate the possibility that holding the iPhone 4 by the lower left-hand corner would hurt its performance.
Jobs showed the results of Apple’s tests of other smartphones–the BlackBerry 9700, the Droid Eris, and the Samsung Omnia II–indicating that their signal strength also drops when they’re held.
He then quoted stats that suggest most users aren’t encountering crippling new reception issues. Only .55 percent of iPhone 4 buyers have called AppleCare with antenna- or reception-related problems; just 1.7 percent of people who bought iPhone 4s from AT&T have returned them (with the iPhone 3GS, it was six percent). According to AT&T, the iPhone 4 drops calls more frequently than the iPhone 3GS–but only by one additional dropped call per 100 calls.
Jobs shared a pet theory: Because the iPhone 4 has a new shape that requires new cases, only twenty percent of buyers leave the Apple Store with a case, versus eighty percent of iPhone 3GS buyers who did. Since it’s using the iPhone 4 without a case that reveals the reception issue, it may just be that more iPhone 4 owners have been exposed to troublesome reception scenarios.
And then he explained how Apple would respond to the iPhone 4 issue:
During the Q&A that followed–which is still going on as I write this–Jobs said that Apple doesn’t have a better antenna design (maybe the next iPhone will have one, he said) and that a Bloomberg story which said an Apple engineer had warned him about the iPhone 4 antenna was “bullshit.”
Throughout, Jobs talked about how hard Apple works to make its customers happy, and how much it loves those customers. He said that Apple isn’t perfect, and didn’t deny that the iPhone 4′s antenna design can cause problems.
So does this end controversy over the iPhone 4? No, I don’t think that anyone, including Jobs, believes that. But it may put the final verdict in the hands of iPhone 4 owners rather than the media or Apple. If millions of people buy the iPhone 4 and don’t encounter any unique reception difficulties, they’ll tell their friends and the phone’s rep will quickly heal. And if those millions of people do find the phone unreliable, they’ll tell their friends that, too.
(Me, I’ve found that my iPhone 4 seems to have good-to-very-good reception in most instances–except when I entered a zone of weak AT&T signal and found that how I held the phone made a huge difference.)
More thoughts to come, but here’s one aspect of all this that cries out for further exploration. In today’s press conference, Jobs showed other phones suffering from reception issues that looked a lot like those that the iPhone 4 can encounter. But when Consumer Reports decided not to recommend the phone, it did so based on tests of the iPhone 4 and other phones which indicated that the 4 has problems that other phones don’t. The “other phones” involved were different, so the conclusions weren’t inconsistent. But I’d like to see CR or another third party with the resources and know-how perform further testing of this sort.
So if you followed the press conference this morning, what’s your take on Apple’s response? Do you think the company is done addressing this?
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 9:06 am on Friday, July 16, 2010
I think of you guys as being at least as good at making Apple predictions as most of the people who get paid big bucks to do so. But when I asked you to figure out what Apple plans to discuss at its iPhone 4 press conference this morning, you didn’t come to a consensus. For all the possibilities I provided, the overwhelming majority of you said that they wouldn’t happen. Either most of you are wrong, or something really surprising will happen in Cupertino in about an hour.
Me, I’m still not sure what the news will be. But here’s an interesting possibility: Some of the latest scuttlebutt says that it might be possible for Apple to fix the reception issue through software alone.
US Senator Charles Schumer steps in to solve the iPhone antenna mess. While he’s at it, can he do something about the Blue Screen of Death?
Apple is inviting journalists to a press event on Friday at its Cupertino campus. The topic is the iPhone 4; the company is presumably going to address the controversy over the phone’s antenna. No matter what it says, it’ll be fascinating to see how it deals with this.
Engadget’s Nilay Patel surveyed Engadget contributors and some other folks (including me) about the iPhone 4 and whether they’ve encountered the grip of death issue. The bottom line is…there is no bottom line! Some people have detected no problem whatsoever and some (like me) have seen it in certain circumstances. Nobody finds it a gotcha so enormous as to render the phone useless.
Even if Nilay’s story doesn’t clear things up, it’s good reading.
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 9:34 am on Tuesday, July 13, 2010
It took three weeks of real-world use before I figured it out. But I’m finally convinced that the iPhone 4′s antenna problem is real, that it’s affecting my phone in certain situations, and that there’s no scenario in which Apple is done responding to this issue.
I spent yesterday at the MobileBeat 2010 conference at San Francisco’s Palace hotel. The hotel is in the South of Market neighborhood, where making phone calls on an iPhone over AT&T can be an iffy proposition in the best of circumstances. And over the course of the day, I ducked out of the conference several times to make important calls.
Call me paranoid, but I have this weird feeling there may be some sort of virus going around Facebook that spams people’s walls with an unsavory message about how to get a “free” iPhone 4…
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 12:33 am on Tuesday, June 22, 2010
As of today, Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader costs $199. Yesterday, on Father’s Day, it was still $259, but with a special offer. My old pal Brad Grimes continues, in a comment from our post today on Amazon’s Kindle price cut:
I bought a $259 Nook yesterday (Sunday) as a gift for my father, enticed by an offer for a “free” $50 gift card. When I saw the price today, I called to see if I could get the difference back. I was told I could get only $10 back. It turns out, after looking at my receipt, they didn’t charge me for a $259 Nook and then give me a “free” $50 gift card, as advertised. They gave me a $209 Nook and charged me $50 for the gift card. Was I just shafted by Barnes & Noble? Harry, help an old friend!!!
By Ed Oswald | Posted at 11:00 am on Monday, June 21, 2010
AT&T is following Comcast’s lead in turning to social networking in order to repair its tarnished brand and reach out to its customers. The company is making a full court press to counter some of the negative publicity that it has received across Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube by building a support staff devoted to answering customer concerns on popular social networking sites.
That group now numbers 19, and almost half of those reached through social networking respond to the team. AT&T is also planning to actively promote the company’s participation in social networking on its bills and websites in an effort to get even more customers to use the service.
Airing customer concerns in public may seem like counter-productive to repairing the bruised image of a company, but it’s not. In the standard phone-based customer service, nobody really sees the work the company does to fix the issue except the caller and the representative. Here in the open, everyone sees it.
While the only fixes for AT&T’s problems really lie in infrastructure improvements, any effort to quell the angst of its customers will go a long way to improving its image. The media has certainly pummeled the company (and rightly so) for its missteps in recent years, especially with the iPhone. Appearing as if it cares may buy it a little more time with consumers to get things right.
[Hat tip: AdAge]
Worst. Company-customer interaction. Ever. Or at least since the legendary “cancel AOL” phone call…
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 10:32 pm on Thursday, May 6, 2010
Back in February, I wrote about “Free iPad” offers. They dangled a product that wasn’t available yet to get people to sign up for a gaggle of marketing schemes. But at least the dangled product was real.
By Benj Edwards | Posted at 11:39 pm on Sunday, February 7, 2010
You saved and you saved until you could finally buy that shiny new $1000 gadget that promised you everything under the stars. When it came time to plug it in, you found your joy being subsumed by abject horror. Your stomach plunged deep into your gut and you (yes, mortal non-designer you) recognized a fundamental flaw in your flashy gizmo so obvious that it made you want to pick up the device and smash it over the designer’s head.
Even the best designers make mistakes…but this article isn’t about them. We’re about to, ahem, celebrate the worst consumer electronics designers through the lens of their faulty creations. Since I’m far from an all-knowing technology god, I’ve limited our survey to fifteen design problems that have not only bugged me through the years, but that are widespread enough to have bugged many of you too. These problems aren’t limited to current technology, but they all fall into the nebulous realm known as “consumer electronics.” You know: TVs, telephones, VCRs, DVD players, MP3 players, and more.
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By Graeme McMillan | Posted at 8:33 am on Tuesday, November 29, 2011
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