Mobile Me mislays mail
Sorry seems to be the hardest word
APPLE IS STILL HAVING birthing problems with Mobile Me, the replacement for its Dot Mac service which never really made the grade.
At the request of the Thin White Duke of Cupertino himself, David G Chapman has been passed the unpleasant duty of keeping the worldwide community of Macolytes up to date with Mobil Me machinations in a regular bog (of sorts).
The first post, which appeared on Friday explained that the first 14 days since the launch had been, a rocky road. "We know the pain some people have been suffering. Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and we’re going to favour getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later."
David goes on to explain how a major problem with one of the company's mail servers had blocked and... er ... lost, about ten per cent of the mails floating about in the ether between July 16th and 18th.
That's lost, folks... not mislaid. Not temporarily unavailable. Gone. Forever. Never gonna get 'em back. No backup... nada.
Apple has since reported that it has added server capacity and tuned its software to scale better. Which means it should behave more gracefully when internet traffic spikes. The team has also fixed problems with mail Syncing to Outlook servers which we reported here.
Up until Sunday, around one per cent of subscriber to the $99 a year service had no, or sporadic, access to email. Apple is promising to fix this, "Within the next couple of days."
What has struck us throughout this whole debacle is that, despite Apple putting up its corporate hands and admitting to having made one holy cock-up of the whole affair, it hasn't said sorry once to the loyal band of followers who keep the Cupertino Cabal in Alfalfa sprout smoothies and hybrid smugmobiles. µ
L'Inq
Appall
Comments
APPL seems to have a remarkable aversion to the 'S' word
Interesting to note - my flatmate, who has bought almost 10K worth of Apple gear in the last year, has never heard the S word once.Items purchased so far: Mac Pro (2x4x3.0Ghz), Macbook Air, Airport Extreme, Time Capsule, Ipod, Ipod touch, Iphone 3G, .mac subscription, .me subscription
It all started with the Airports. Advertised as being able to do '600Mbit wireless link', we set it up all excited to get rid of the wires across our flat and what would you know - even when 5 feet apart on either side of the loungeroom, the highest transfer speed possible over the 'waves was 4 MEGABYTES a second.
Apple admitted 'oh yeah we're aware of that problem' but never said sorry. Sorry for taking basically $1000 off your hands and giving you 3-4MB/s.
Second issue - macbook air. Something went wrong with it and it needed the mobo replaced. Dropped it into the Sydney Mac Store, 3 days later it's back and my flatmate notices it's a little slower.
They've installed a 1.6Ghz board instead of the 1.8 it previously had. The 1.8 part wasn't in the country, so someone decided 'it's more important to have the 3 day turnaround, giving the customer a downgrade than make them wait for the 1.8 to come in from the 'States.' Woops.
Again, no 'sorry' was forthcoming. People pointed fingers at other people and blame was offered, but never a sorry was offered.
Thirdly; all the issues with the .Mac and .Me service. On top of that, he noticed that although the service SAYS he should have 20G available, he only has 13G. He raised the issue, they said they'd look into why he wasn't allocated the full 20G, however, nary a sorry forthcoming about that either.
Fourthly; he purchased the Iphone 3G on the day it came out, and couldn't activate it via Itunes for at least a few days. "We know about the issue' but hey, we'll die before we say a simple 'sorry'.
Perhaps it's a reflection of the necessary nature of litigation-proofing your business; perhaps saying the 'S' word will open them up to a torrent of lawsuits. If that's the case, it's a sad state for American business when courtesy cannot be offered as it will be used against you.
However, you would think that at least a sorry would be offered for downgrading his Macbook Air and hoping he wouldn't notice. And the whole debacle with the useless wireless speeds between our two Airport Extremes (one being a Time Capsule) would rate a sorry too.
nope. No sorries. Never.