It's time for Apple to bundle the "Gbrainy" set of games with every device they sell because I have never seen such an inept, disorganized and clueless bunch of users as the Apple user base. I don't blame the users for that, I blame Apple for making them so ignorant and incompetent. That's what happens when you don't foster curiosity in your users and substitute that by the following of a charismatic leader and sheep-like behavior. Plus they have incredibly low expectations and demands. Finally some don't even have self-respect as I've seen people literally "begging" for a solution in the forum. Soon they'll be praying. In my life I've had to deal with supporting users coming from the typewriter era who couldn't even find the power switch to their computer yet they were very bright people, and as ignorant as they were of the IT world, they still had abilities to observe, report things in a structured way, and analyze situations and could elaborate solutions based on deduction and inference.
One thing Apple should have done here is enforce posting to this thread through a "form" i.e. no free text posting until a person fills a form with critical questions i.e. restore method, time zone, city, carrier, type of mail. So at least they could use the info in this thread and add it to the database where they collect info from their profiling tools. As it stands this forum is entirely useless for Apple and anyone else. It belong to the "Support Nightmare Series vol X". It is purely a psychological venting valve as it stands.
Another thing is that Apple should have elected an employee to add a post that supersedes the initial one where "suggestions" would be consolidated by geographic location/carrier... so right away say a "verizon" user from western US could try to implement a solution that has been proven to somehow work by peers having a similar profile. So that would be profile based stickies if you want, whatever it's called.
Finally you would expect users to team out together to make some deductions i.e. "I have 3 friends with a 4S and we all live in the same city and use 2 different carriers and we noticed that the draining issue is greater with this carrier under similar usage etc yet when we went hiking and there was some problematic coverage spots, we noticed such and such". But nah, all you have is a bunch of disjointed users competing for THE contribution that will solve it all, proving by the same token that they haven't read 2 pages back where another person posted the same solution and others confirmed it wasn't working for them.
You would expect one if not the greatest tech company in the world to have implemented such simple things as what I just suggested. This will occupy my thoughts long after the battery issue is solved i.e. how leveling things out in terms of interface and way of thinking hampers support and ability to cope with problems and think outside of the box... which in turn makes you wonder how those same inept users will cope with the real important issues in their lives, emotional distress, and other important decisions which will have impacts on others worldwide. Scary. Imagine for one moment Apple had been the main utility providing electricity...
Good luck nevertheless.
Scarface.
Level 1
(86 points)
Jason L
Community Specialists
