urn:uuid:6c91f4cc-cde7-3efa-769e-5ba26ba620c6 http://gethuman.com/Apple/news_74/atom http://gethuman.com/images/gethuman-hands50.gif urn:uuid:868bc1f6-b196-0b5e-9464-2dc77bb0f710 2011-12-08T21:25:52+00:00

urn:uuid:dc42665c-79df-5f4b-6a71-9946b3cfd0af 2011-12-02T13:03:54+00:00

urn:uuid:b25dbe39-7807-58e1-146d-a1b80242a85c 2011-10-29T22:29:47+00:00

urn:uuid:9fcfb5c6-bf18-1c02-e91d-2d4ed0c6b68d 2011-10-24T16:57:17+00:00

urn:uuid:73234807-a0b8-bb12-e88b-5d9e25e3a90b 2011-10-16T23:53:34+00:00

urn:uuid:0755cfae-0de7-46bb-0c9e-b65db57137d5 2011-10-11T21:49:21+00:00

urn:uuid:c6553596-6961-ba5b-94c5-06e817656fd6 2011-10-06T21:06:37+00:00

urn:uuid:aaa9a7d3-5087-f135-778c-c8cd50527d04 2011-10-06T14:46:13+00:00

Apple to deal with health issues, but did anyone expect his passing to come this quickly? Pancreatic cancer, one of the most incurable forms of cancer took the greatest entrepreneur of my generation, just like that. Don't think he wasn't the most innovative mind either. You can have Bill Gates. I'm with Steve.

For anyone who grew up during the 1980's, we have never seen someone like him. Someone so innovative, so brilliant, so connected to what people want. No one has ever done more in the technology space. Think about it. He changed the way the public views computers, music, movies, and even customer service. Don't believe me? Go walk around any major city and notice how many people are talking on iPhones, listening to iPods, downloaded music from iTunes, or using iPads to place orders in stores. He made personal computing cool. See a kid with a "Toy Story" backpack or a "Cars" related toy? That's all Steve. For a while (and it still may be) seeing those white headphones was a fashion trend. Quite simply, he created products that people needed, and people wanted, when no one else could see it coming. Remember when Apple announced they were getting into the phone business? People thought they were crazy, and look how that worked out. So yeah, I'm sad, and I never even met the guy. The weird thing is, others of my generation feel the same way. Christian Allen, the Chief Technical Officer of GetHuman.com said it best when I was talking to him about the passing of iSteve this morning. He claimed "he is, by far, the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. Between the adversity he faced (being fired from your own huge company that you started in a garage??), and how hard he fought for machines to be more aesthetic and organic and human-like - his life's work was a masterpiece." I couldn't have said it better myself.

For those who have never seen his graduation speech at Standford, check it out here. It's nothing short of exceptional.

Thanks Steve. You'll be missed. ]]>

urn:uuid:e2e5cb37-0d67-c5b0-727c-cf41c7d0f21e 2011-09-26T16:49:00+00:00

urn:uuid:9c28e0ce-ea30-c1bd-a61b-7b50d3ce1145 2011-09-21T16:05:18+00:00

Apple could soon be taking that motto and running with it.

A new survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) confirms once again what we already know - Apple is the best. After posting a record number last year in terms of customer satisfaction, Apple has added to it's score this year, bringing it to 87 points, a full 9 points better than it's closest competitor in the sector. Followed by Compaq and HP, Apple has extended it's customer satisfaction lead with the introduction and continued dominance of the iPad. The iPad has dominated the tablet space and has taken market share from Apple's closest competitors as the company yet again proves that it is light years away from it's closest competitors when it comes to innovative products, customer satisfaction and customer service. It's just not even close people. The good news for you non-Apple lovers is, the personal computer space in general has increased in customer satisfaction in the past years with HP receiving an ACSI score of 78, a mishmash of Sony, Lenovo and Toshiba receiving a score of 77, and Compaq getting a 75.

For those unfamiliar with the ACSI system, the press release describes the scoring system as "The American Customer Satisfaction Index is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States. Data from interviews with approximately 70,000 customers annually are used as inputs into an econometric model to measure satisfaction with more than 225 companies in 47 industries and 10 economic sectors, along with over 200 services, programs, and websites of approximately 130 federal government agencies. Results are released on a monthly basis with all measures reported using a 0 to 100 scale. ACSI data have proven to be strongly related to a number of essential indicators of micro and macroeconomic performance. For example, firms with higher levels of customer satisfaction tend to have higher earnings and stock returns relative to competitors. Stock portfolios based on companies that show strong performance in ACSI deliver excess returns in up markets as well as down markets. And, at the macro level, customer satisfaction has been shown to be predictive of both consumer spending and gross domestic product growth. The Index was founded at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and is produced by ACSI LLC."

To read more about the ACSI scores, click here. ]]>

urn:uuid:cf033926-687b-5ee8-9239-e01c7995412c 2011-09-09T18:13:58+00:00

urn:uuid:79440dd5-b1f3-f98a-4241-818ce523a84e 2011-08-27T22:19:49+00:00

urn:uuid:517623cb-2b62-debc-fa25-a43c84bcee91 2011-08-27T16:51:12+00:00

urn:uuid:3df58377-8580-600b-dc66-852259ca1ff9 2011-08-05T01:06:06+00:00

urn:uuid:2558bf56-348e-4d61-f8af-fd9d4c7ad33a 2011-08-05T01:04:10+00:00

urn:uuid:1c617520-269b-4924-d755-47f973d6a0ea 2011-08-05T01:00:54+00:00

urn:uuid:30b266c5-baa7-7ecc-fc41-4be592d1a730 2011-08-02T21:06:24+00:00

urn:uuid:f6fcc490-8171-3c4b-a733-559fe1e100cf 2011-07-07T14:55:36+00:00

Apple outperformed PC's in every category, but the most drastic difference was in....(wait for it) customer service! Shocking I know. In all seriousness though, Apple was more helpful in helping customers decide which computer to buy, had computers that are more easy to setup, and in general, had a more helpful customer service department. What it really comes down to is, Apple is more effective at training its staff to understand its products, which gets directly transferred to its customers through solid customer service. Anyone who has ever been in an Apple store can recognize this fact. As soon as you walk into an Apple store, you are greeting by a happy, helpful, willing, customer service representatives right there to help you decide which product is best for you, and that can't necessarily be said for PC's. The biggest knock against Apple is the cost of the products, but if you factor in the additional premium of getting excellent customer service, as well as a quality product, it's well worth the price.

For more on the results of the survey, click here. ]]>

urn:uuid:bf67ad45-0833-eaee-01d5-2b1b69961b0d 2011-05-19T18:00:31+00:00

Apple is telling its customer service representatives to not help customers who's computers have been infected with the malware. Apple is worried about setting the precedent of helping users remove viruses from their computers, so the company is telling technicians to not help them at all. Thanks guys that's really helpful. Seeing as this is the first major virus to hit Mac's you would think the company would be more than willing to help customers out, but apparently that's not the case. However, lucky for you, we are not Apple and we have found a way to remove the virus, courtesy of our friends at CNET. According to CNET, "If you have been tricked into installing Mac Defender or one of its evil clones, you should be able to remove it by deleting the app from the Applications folder. If it tries to stop you, open up Activity Monitor -- search in Finder if you don't know how to find it -- and you'll see all the processes your Mac is carrying out. Click on Mac Defender and hit the big red Quit Process button at the top. Then delete the app." See Apple, was that so hard? With that resolved, we can all go back to playing Angry Birds in peace. That means you too Apple customer service reps.

To read the entire CNET article, click here. ]]>

urn:uuid:b8a9d018-eb82-95c2-b456-15de78155d3f 2011-04-28T15:06:07+00:00

Apple has posted on it's website the explanation to the uproar about it's use of tracking information in the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Below is the response as well as the company's software update information that will be released in the next few weeks.

Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone? Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this? Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location? The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone? The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data? No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today? This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database? It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data? Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.

9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties? We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).

10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important? Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.

Software Update Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

* reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,

* ceases backing up this cache, and

* deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

For a copy of the press release, click here. ]]>