The Empire strikes back - An Apple employee on the dangers of tech blogs

Last week I wrote about the revenge of the consumer. Now I'll give some airtime to someone from the other side:

After Apple - We Are, I’m Afraid, Only Human

.... So some guy on a blog writing that Apple are saying that MacBook top cases are being replaced when they are not doesn’t help anyone. Not the pissed off customer who travelled thirty miles to the Store, not the Genius, no-one. So please blog writers, and yes, you know who you are, for the love of God stop writing this nonsense as if you know what you are talking about because you don’t and you are doing more damage than you could possibly imagine in your wildest nightmares. Seriously. Apple are damm good at admitting mistakes and when there is a need for a product recall everyone will know about it on the support pages of the website or if you have registered your product correctly a direct email will inform you. Even if the product is out of warranty Apple will honour the repair if it’s been officially announced. Most electronics manufacturers don’t do this sort of thing for their customers, Apple do. Most electronic manufacturers don’t have a free tech support area in their Store, if they even have a Store in the first place, Apple do. Blog writers are not the authority, Apple are, that’s not arrogance, it’s a fact.

Hmm. Food for thought. I'm biased by my experience with 3 consecutive defective 3rd generation iPods (I kept the last one rather than go for yet another return -- the usb sync doesn't work), but my iBook video fears turned out to be misplaced. Macintouch has made a valiant effort to look deeper, and they find some Apple products have unusually high defect rates and some are remarkably solid. (The G4 iBooks are a wonder of reliability, the 3rd generation iPods were somewhat lemony.) I remain suspicious about the quality of Apple's central repair services -- even the sober minded Macintouch site cautions against buying Apple refurbished laptops.

On the other hand I do believe Apple is far more responsive and supportive than Dell, and vastly better than SONY, Panasonic, etc. I'll try to give them a bit more credit than I have ...