It was because I had such previous good experience with the MBP that I went for the monitor. It was a learning experience.
I should say that Apple India, did try their best to solve the problem, but it was beyond their control. That product should never have been sold in a place with such a dodgy power-grid.
Sure. I’m an Apple customer and am very happy with their support.
But my point is that Apple paid you for your time, made sure you had whatever communications resources and second-level support systems you needed, and so on. You were not in the same position as an unaffiliated individual who is offering unpaid volunteer support.
I’ve seen enough analysis of it from enough different angles I don’t believe so.
Now that I absolutely believe. It’s one of the things that bugs me about big companies in general and big tech companies in particular. Yes, it’s good to measure things and metrics are important, but which metrics are chosen is up to people and people are biased, have agendas, etc. It is sooo easy to get tunnel vision with all of the data and correlations and forget which parts you need to take with a grain of salt…
My advantage is that I can’t be fired. I can be driven away, but that would only reduce my stress levels. I don’t have to care what anyone thinks.
And that’s one of my areas of specialisation, ensuring data analysis does not get twisted by preset ideas and tunnel vision.
That’s where I am now. Apart from some Microsoft support, and a couple of confidential projects, all my work is voluntary.
This is kind of US/UK-centric. I have never had a Zoom or Teams call in this country where someone didn’t have a technical issue. That’s on every single call. Y’all are not taking into account the actions of the telecommunications regulator who throttles calls, the actions of various intelligence agencies who listen in, IP whitelists and blacklists. Perhaps those issues are lacking in US/UK tech support, but here it’s another matter.
So it’s probably a good thing the Zoom sessions in question are being offered on a volunteer peer-to-peer basis, not as part of L&L’s support offering.
This is one reason why email is our preferred channel for official support. Volunteers are of course free to use whatever channel they prefer.
I’ve had them here in Aus, zero probs, with NZ, Vietnam, and if most parts of the US can do it, most semi-developed countries can. There are many countries worldwide with better internet than US, (or Aus)
The US is a big place, and there are vast differences between the most and least well-connected areas. Probably the same is true in Australia and many other geographically large countries.
Internet was pretty good in Vietnam, as I recall. No experience with Antipodean service. But let’s just say it’ a big world out there.
Elaborating on this “zoom” thing. Can’t count the number of times I’ve been in conversation with otherwise very cleaver and intelligent people who felt the need to apologize about their not understanding this “techy” stuff. For some, I can only assume felt to be a badge of honor–or maybe a force field to keep all that “techy” stuff away.
To me, it often sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. When confronted with a challenge, it doesn’t help to say we’re not able to master it. As my grandmother used to say, “Can’t never could do anything.”
It can simply be a statement about limited resources and priorities.
My mother absolutely could learn computers if she had spare time, energy, and reason. Back when her job (when she was still working) required using a computer, she raced through learning the software that she needed to do her job, to the point that as a relatively new hire (and one of the older people in her department) they had her train some of the incoming new hires. But outside of those specific applications – what we would call general computer literacy – she had no reason to learn it and a lot of other more important things to do in her limited time.
Very true. I said often, not always.
My point was, people hold up the US as a positive example, but the reality is for a significant portion of the population it is substandard in the extreme, and expensive with limited choice/no choice.
Aus is pretty good these days, but compared to places like Singapore and Korea, behind.
It generally, but not always, follows population density. Back when I first moved to the town I live in (a growing bedroom community near to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Boeing) we were one of GTE’s testbeds for new tech because we had a tech-savvy userbase. I was pretty busy installing and supporting ISDN connections for folks that couldn’t live with dial-up. We were one of the first areas in the country to get ADSL rolled out, although we had large neighborhoods that had substandard phone wiring and GTE didn’t want to sink the money into upgrades until they were ready to roll out fiber backbones.
Then the Verizon purchase of GTE happened.
No fiber upgrades. No copper upgrades. We had a thriving LOS IP-over-radio business in town for a while, until Comcast finally put the $$ in to upgrade cable. There are major neighborhoods (including mine) that still don’t have fiber – everyone who bought/sold Verizon’s fiber operations didn’t see the value in all the physical upgrades they’d need to do. Ziply is finally supposedly upgrading my neighborhood to get fiber, but if I didn’t pay for Comcast, I’d be stuck with 1-3Mbps ADSL because of all the substandard telco wiring that still hasn’t been upgraded 20+ years later.
And this is in a good size town that is 45 minutes from downtown Seattle.
We have friends who live in town who have to use dial-up (and can’t even get 56K) or Hughes satellite, which is a geo-synchronous service that is high-latency and high-cost. Services like Clear, etc., are a joke in this area. If you’re near a cell tower, put your phone in hotspot mode and take advantage of 4G (more 5G is coming every month).
Again, within an hour drive of Seattle and the “Silicon Forest” east side.
The US consumer side of the Internet supply is a joke and it will be until the government forces them to do something about it. Some of the towns that are in the best shape are the ones that run their own telco/Internet as a municipal utility – they were able to capitalize on Federal grants to help underwrite upgrading the physical plant that make broadband connections a reality.
