Comment by socalgal2 a day ago
The support pages are not for you to contact Apple. They are there for users to help other users. The cynical person would say they are there to get unpaid labor from other users so Apple can spend less on support.
If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
As an Easter egg, I wonder if they can make it accept input in stdin and just discard it. If I was working there and didn’t mind burning some bridges (I’m not sure how many people would get wind of it as it’s quite obscure) I would be tempted to implement it.
The support pages are exactly this. They're called Level 0 support in most companies internally.
"Just award them with some stars or points or whatever, and they'll be happy."
I wish these people would wake up and spend their time helping peers on a forum for some open source project instead.
There's a bunch of hyperactive people in those Apple "support" forums who don't actually help anyone. They respond to almost every discussion thread aggressively deflecting any criticism directed at Apple.
They pretend to offer "solutions" so their posts don't come across as unconstructive, but their solutions are always essentially the same, often culminating in a factory reset. There is never any attempt to get to the bottom of anything or diagnose what the actual issue is.
They are volunteering their time to make people shut up, bow their head in shame and go away. I don't think this is what you want in an open source project.
Indeed. Apple should close those forums. It damages their brand to have such antagonistic people pretending to be support agents. A company of Apple's wealth could afford to have a small army of people in the Philippines do the same job with much less aggression.
Exactly same are the Google “support forums”.
At least you know it’s not working as place to submit issue reports. It is better than other way, like Figma, 1Password and many others: a Support Forum with an army of yes-men “support specialists”. They would answer your query with basic troubleshooting and then will say that it will be passed to development team or will be considered, etc. perfectly designed system to pacify user and dismiss their report.
Yes, fanbois, lecturing people that they're using it wrong.
It's not just on Apple's forums, Microsoft has the same kind of guys. They tend to look really popular too because all the other fanbois upvote their comments.
And not only there, many open-source software forums have the same problem.
I wonder if other cult brands attract the same kind of personalities, or if Apple has somehow done something special to encourage it. When a Harley Davidson owner says he has a problem with his bike, do Harley zealots jump out of the woodwork to attack the dissenter and defend the brand from which they derive their personality?
For Windows support I assume it accrues some benefit to the unpaid support, like it contributes to them getting their Microsoft Certified Windows End User Support Helpful Guy badge.
This is starting to make sense. In the past I've been confused at a seemingly useful question thread there and the answer from some other user there with some like "top support user" badge or something, is just not an answer at all, and then the thread gets locked because they deemed it resolved.