Just to show this is anecdotal, I have been using Apple notebooks for many years and have only ever had one problem. That problem was a defective trackpad. The Apple Store replaced the computer outright with the newer model as they were unable to get the part within seven days due to Christmas holidays. I hear good and bad things about customer service of all sorts of companies, but more often than not I have heard positive things about Apple.
Apple is probably the only company that comes to mind when I try to think of positive customer service experiences. Even when my apple care expired they still helped me.
My MBP is now 6 years old, still trying to get my employer to replace it. The only problems I had were the HDD going bad (I replaced it with SSD) and the trackpad no longer works (i spilled a drink on it once or twice). I also dropped is in the street a couple times which could have contributed to the HDD failure.
Overall I've never owned any other devices this long with continuous use. With all that being said they are going to need to change their approach on this issue or they risk damaging that support reputation.
I've had very good experiences with Dell both in Japan and Poland.
[Japan] One day the fan of my Latitude started making a clicking noise so I called the service, scheduled a visit for the next Saturday and got the fan replaced, even though the noise didn't occur when the serviceman was testing it. In the process of replacing the fan he noticed my case is missing two rubber feet and promised to send me a replacement. A week later I got a whole bottom part of the case in mail.
[Poland] My dad had some problems with BSODs on his Vostro and after a bit of back and forth with the service they replaced the whole motherboard for him. Almost 3 years into warranty, 1 month before it expired.
If I ever decide to go back to Windows or Linux I'm going with Dell and their NBD warranty.
I've had pretty great repair service from Lenovo in January of this year, and with Acer in 2013. Both are for devices I purchased as a private consumer, not as a big contract corporate client.
I've had some terrible experience with Lenovo around 2010, so this may be hit or miss, but Apple is certainly not the only company that can provide decent service.
I don't think the defect is the problem but rather the communication on Apple's part. Problems happen, people in IT are most probably used to that. But a company should just admit the error and move on.
I personally had the same experience as GP (but ages ago): Bought an iBook G3 that had multiple main board faults every few months (that was a problem of the whole series). In Germany you can get your money back if a product has the same fault multiple times (i.e. the manufacturer is unable to fix the issue). Both Apple and Gravis, the retailer, acted so horribly despite the perfectly clear law and a clear paper trail of the multiple defects that I had to hire a lawyer to get my money back. Of course I'll never buy anything Apple again - not because of the defects (as said, that can happen to every manufacturer) but rather because of the awful response.
At my company we all use Apple hardware besides screens and one surface and we have a failure rate of around 70% over two years for our MacBook Pros. We had 2 with the graphics problem and 7 had disk failures. 2 others had failing keyboards and trackpads. But since it was always in the 2 year span we didn't had any problems to get them repaired.
The difference, I think, is that Apple KNOWS about certain problems, e.g. Trackpad. If there's no water damage, then it's clearly a manufacturing defect. In OPs case, they thought he was lying because they'd never seen that issue happen without accidental damage.
A similar thing happened with an HP laptop I owned. They had problems with hinges breaking for no reason other than poor design. I searched online and found a bunch of people had the problem and some got it replaced as a manufacturing defect. I tried for months to get HP to do something about it. Finally I went to my boss who at the time was connected with some HP big shot. Using that leverage is the only way I've ever gotten HP to fix a single thing.
We're blessed with lots of old and failing HP kit which is slowly being swapped out for Supermicro stuff so every time something goes pop, they get on the phone and screw the warranty as hard as possible then sell the warranty bits as new on ebay and scrap the chassis.
This is our operations team's way of issuing karma for years of pain if that's any consolation :)
I acquired a Nexus 4 from a friend after it had fallen into a (clean) toilet. She sent it to me to attempt to fix, and I too started with silica gel, moved onto placing it near the boiler, and eventually set it beside a dehumidifier. After a couple of weeks the phone appeared bone dry, but I couldn't get past the boot screen.
Fast forward six months of the Nexus 4 sitting in a drawer forgotten about. I took it out and charged it. Amazingly, the phone now works 100%.
Graduate software engineer jobs in the UK hit £30,000 at the very top end. From the experience of friends in the industry, £24,000-26,000 seems more realistic.
I work as junior software engineer in central London and my salary is £26.000 before taxes.
I think I am underpaid but there are a lot of benefits (gym, breakfast, friday lunch, office in Soho), so I can't complain.
How? This always confused me. That's approaching the poverty line here in the U.S.
For example: a standard McDonald's employee makes roughly $24,000 per year. This requires no education and just about anyone can do the work. It's also considered one of the lowest level jobs a person can get. I'm not degrading those people I'm just speaking on the status quo.
Now take a look at a manager at McDonalds. They're approaching almost $40,000 per year. You're telling me that you make less than a McDonalds manager? A job which requires no education, and arguably no real skill beyond what's taught at work?
This is absolutely insane to me that the pay is so low. How do you afford to eat? How do you afford health insurance or a car or rent? I know when I was working for $15 an hour ($28,800 per year) I had a hard time just paying the bills. The rent was always late and I had to drop my health insurance for a couple years. Do you not have student loans?
£26k is low for London but should be fine outside London - I would assume that it would increase to £35k after a year or two if he was staying in London.
Most people in the UK don't have health insurance because it's not needed because we have the NHS.
Student loans will most likely only be with the government's SLC agency which only takes 9% of your salary above £21k.
Many people who live in Lomdon don't have cars because there is little point, however travel cards still cost a lot anyway.
That is low. It is hard to know what people mean by "junior" but you should expect to get a decent pay increase every year or more often really from that level.
Well, let me clarify this. When I started I was just graduated and I came in London without actually speaking english.
So, though I had some cool side projects, they couldn't offer me more.
Now, things are completely different. I improved my language and most of all I improved my skill.
In my role as a 'junior' I do the same job of my colleagues, the only difference is that they don't let me to lead a project, mainly because I am not yet able to properly speak with clients.
A year after I graduated I got my first role in London at £27000 for a dev role (one above junior). This was an enterprise java role and in the first year I worked in a team of 3 building a custom CMS (it was a telecoms publishing house) and then a BI platform. My pay moved up fairly quickly over the years but I don't think I know even a CTO here who earns more than £90000. The SF salaries do sound crazy high.
I wouldn't say 'very top end' - I've hired graduates for more than that. Not much more (£36k, I think, was the highest), but there's always flexibility.
There are many, many programs at Cisco. I don't know any that offer that as an initial salary. There may be a "total benefits package" that, in theory, adds up to that.
I like the idea. I'm not sure how long Facebook will allow it to operate for, but it's a good tool for those of us conscious about the amount of data shared on social networks.
However, I have two issues:
The site is claiming that the likes are used to populate advertising on Facebook. Surely a better way to prevent that is through http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads§ion=social&... rather than removing likes? Perhaps I'm being misled by Facebook, but I have presumed that by toggling the option on the linked page to "no one" I would not have my data used to populate advertising in that way.
A second issue is the access the site is asking for; it is significantly too much. Again, I'm not overly familiar with Facebook so perhaps I'm incorrect here, but surely the site only needs fairly restricted access? Maybe the API doesn't allow such fine-tuning, but being allowed to post on my timeline seems excessive.
Of course the graph is fake math. It's only a representation of the long term goal, not a literal indicator of what will occur. I think that Orchestra are being fairly open about this; the same post that the graph was taken from also states, "if we run into unexpected snags, we may even stop filling reservations temporarily."
I downloaded it from the UK store, but I had to download it through the link in this post, as the Apple search cache probably hasn't updated yet on the App Store.
I registered around 1:35 PM EST and there was ~250,000 people ahead of me. Looks like a lot of traction. You are, of course, giving this company access to your Gmail, but perhaps that's a small price to pay?
I have read several posts about ditching smartphones in recent months, and the writer invariably states that they were not addicted. However, if their behaviour pattern cannot be changed while still owning a smartphone, then they are addicted. It's a question of will power, and it seems many people don't have it.
I went through a stage of dependency on my iPhone, always filling in small gaps in my day with games, Twitter, email or Facebook. I realised I was spending too much time on it, and so for the past couple of years I've significantly restricted my time with the phone. Certainly it is never used in company. In my opinion, I've found a happy balance. I still get all the myriad pros that a smartphone offers, but don't reach for it every time I'm not busy.
To stop all the letters. I had no TV for a couple of years and we would get letters all the time. Even when told the inspectors would still try and come round. They even faked who they were once, pretended they were here to deliver a package.
An irrational sense of not cheating quite as much. A vast overestimation of TV Licensing's ability to detect you - something like correlating cable/satellite subscription databases with license payers list (as if paying for cable, but claiming to own a BW TV set isn't a red flag) and the nefarious detector vans.
The physical principle is that they detect the leakage from the local oscillator in the superheterodyne receiver circuit.
I very much doubt that they exist now, if they ever did. It just isn't cost efficient compared to sending out letters and low paid inspectors who peer through windows looking for people watching TV.
The only means I know of for one to reliably detect the image on the screen would be TEMPEST style attacks [1]. I doubt that Capita can afford to buy the necessary equipment, or even views it as economically viable given the volume of letters they sent out - 56 million letters were sent in 2009, for example [2].
I'm not sure if modern TVs will even emit anything obvious since the connection from the decoder to the panel is covered in EMI shielding.
