Next Gen Tech: A Cautionary Tale
Yesterday, my iPhone became the latest victim of a wave of buggy units. About 3 months after unboxing the phone I lost the entire bottom strip of touch sensitivity. For those of you who don’t have an iPhone, that means no call button, no email, no Safari, and no iPod. Add that to a number of other functions that are tied to being able to touch the bottom of the screen and you begin to see the picture: no bottom strip = gimped iPhone.
Houston, we have a problem
Restarting and restoring the phone does nothing. This issue has been well documented by people with similar problems, and the bottom line is that the four main functions of my machine are gone with no way to fix the issue on my end.
This little fiasco has led to some creative workarounds. I won’t share all of them here - I’m still trying to get a book deal out of this - but I’ll give you a few examples. Let’s say you want to call me. You can’t just call me. You’ve got to actually send me a text so I can view it first (thankfully the “View/Ignore” buttons show up at the vertical center of the screen), then scroll up on the SMS list to the alternate call button. If I want to call someone, I have to send them a text first and go through the same backdoor method.
This baffled the Pasadena Mac Store staff, and they promptly (if you can call an entire day with no phone “prompt”) set me up with an appointment to try and fix the problem or get a replacement the next day. Hopefully, this will fix my very sad iPhone.
The larger problem here is one our love/hate relationship with communication technology.
While searching for a fix, I read a couple of articles written back in August
forecasting that these problems would start cropping up in a large percentage of phones 3-6 months after unboxing. It sounds like the forecasts are coming true and Apple will be dealing with a large number of disappointed customers - ones who’ve had just enough time to start truly relying on their phones, only to have their hearts broken when the problems start.
What this whole issue is really hinting at is the drastically lower standards we have for testing technology than we do for pretty much anything else. In the ever-quickening marketplace, companies rush products to distribution often with far less than perfect quality analysis.
On the other side, take the FDA approval process. On average, it takes a company 12 years and $359 billion to get an experimental drug to market. This sort of thorough and comprehensive testing process is unheard of in the technology world. (The MS Vista debacle is one of the most glaring examples of this sort of premature distribution.)
The end result is companies spending many more dollars on patching and fixing the problems post-distribution than if they’d just done the extra legwork when they still had the products in their hands.
This problem isn’t just relegated to phones and operating systems. Virtually every high-tech gadget released these days seems to encounter some kind of bugaboo when the product hits the wild.
I’m not logging this to blame Apple.
I love my iPhone, even with the latest bottom strip crash, the stalls, and everything else that’s lacking in the phone (read: 3G, GPS, Voice recording…). It’s still an exceptional and innovative product with an excellent customer support staff to handle any problems. I’m certain that Apple will come through and fix the problem or replace my faulty unit.
The point of writing this is to highlight the different levels of quality standards for things upon which we are seemingly equally reliant. Surely I’d rather have higher standards for the products that I actually put into my body. But on the day that your central line of communication to the outside world crashes, there’s little consolation when you consider that the problem might have been avoided if it’d undergone another couple months of testing.
It seems nowadays that everything released is stamped with a “Beta” label and shipped off for human consumption. The question I pose to you is this: how much are you willing to sacrifice in terms of QA standards to have these next generation products quicker?
Followup
A day before this post was published I had my Genius Bar appointment at the Apple store in Pasadena. Long-story-short, they replaced the phone lickety split with a smile on their face. No manager involvement, no questions or prodding with the phone to try to get it working while I waited. My genius bar helper just walked to the back, picked up a new phone and brought it out to me. That easy - 5 minutes of setting up the new phone in store and I was walking out a happy customer :) Oh, and what’s more is that the new phone synced in perfectly with the old phone as if I’d lost nothing at all - music, notes, photos, contacts, emails, even recent call history was all still perfectly in tact a couple minutes after plugging it in. I’ve replaced a few phones in the last couple years, and I’ve gotta say that this sort of backup syncing without having to re-enter 100+ contacts makes the process so simple and painless that it’s really hard to bear any hard feelings.
It’s customer service experiences like this that really make me happy to be an iPhone owner. When asked about if they’d seen a lot of replacements like this, the service guy conceded that they had seen several in the last month, but that they didn’t seem out of the ordinary based on the fact that the iPhone is still 1st gen and they’re working out a lot of these issues… he continued by saying that their mandate on the customer end is to just “be cool” about it and replace the phones outright once hardware problems are identified like this one. So, one bad iPhone does not an epidemic make, but if you do encounter a hardware problem with yours, make a Genius Bar appointment (it’s free if you’re under warranty) and get it worked out in store.
This makes me glad I ordered a Motorola Q yesterday. ‘Course, AT&T’s coverage positively blows where I am anyway.
Not that this is some kind of “Hah, I knew better” note. You’re looking at the girl who bought a 360 at launch and got the red ring of dead a few months ago. I’m such an addict I didn’t wait for Microsoft to replace it for me…I went out and got a 360 Elite instead.
Right. So I spent $499 an a unit that died a year and a half later, and then did it again for a nicer unit. Go figure.
Short answer: not much. I’m generally not an early adopter, and so I let you all do my beta-testing for me.
I think it’s also related to the fact that I like being able to tinker - getting something that I’ll almost *have* to take in to a shop to get repaired is really unappealing, whereas is it’s an older model, there’s more information out there about how I can tweak it without having to figure it all out as I go. So, it’s not like I’m chomping at the bit over the new stuff; the lack of QA is one of the fundamental pieces of the item to me.
Honestly though, I am stunned by how flawless my iphone has worked for the last 3 months (all though as of 5 days ago it started randomly freezing).
I don’t agree that testing has lessened. I believe complexity has increased.
Testing is not trivial. It’s difficult. How often has a client been the one to report a css bug in your code? Considering how often we miss that kind of bug, isn’t it miraculous that apple was able to build a pocket sized computer with a truely innovative interface?
I see the iphone as a mini computer. I dont think my laptop could fare any better if it was subjected to the challenges my phone has been through.
I have to agree with Peter (and disagree with you brandon, though you pose an interesting question). The level of complexity today in my iPhone outstripps the complexity of my first IMB by 1000x. After all, my dad and I were wonder how we could ever need more than 15MB of ram. Shows what we knew.
The interesting question is the user’s tolerance level.
Is it changing? Are we learning to accept that all our electronics will be buggy or break? After all, none of us ever expect the hamburger to look as good as the one in the picture. We have had our expectation molded by the industry.
@Susan - I am so stoked- I finally bought a PS2! (clearly not an early video game adopter) I’ve always wondered why people buy a game system early since it takes time for them to come out with good games. That said, if no one did it they wouldn’t have the games, so my sincere thanks!
@Alice - Welcome to our blog! (hi) Thrilled to be your beta tester. I “played” beta tester for the ford focus svt, not realizing you NEVER buy the first year of a new model. I knew the name of each and every person in the ford service department. Good think I lived 4 blocks from the dealership back then. Now he has had all his kinks worked out and ducer (his name) is in prime shape. hmmm never thought of this - are car years about like dog years? That would make my car 36.
@susan: So sad to hear about the first 360 - you must really have enjoyed the first one though to warrant making the upgrade when the first one conked out. Funny thing is that my experience with the iPhone is much the same; which is to say that if it did quit, and for some strange reason Apple didn’t back it, I’d probably pick another one up just because I love using it so much. The Q was a runner up though in my hunt for a smart phone, so best of luck to ya with it
@alice: The truth is that I’ve never been an early adopter either… but my old phone (a RAZR) was on it’s last legs and being that I was already saddled with AT&T, I decided to make lemonade out of what looks like a truckful of lemons. Plus, the early buyer credit bought me all the extra accessories that I’d wanted for just a little bit more than if I’d bought any of the other smart phones in their lineup. And what’s more, I feel like the iPhone has bridged a huge gap in the evolution of cell phone user interaction from clumsy-but-workable interfaces to beautiful, fun, easy to user interfaces.
So, this early adopter thing has been an adventure for me… but it’s actually been kinda exciting just because of all the buzz surrounding the product. I can literally draw emotional responses from people just by pulling it out of my pocket in an elevator… which is weird… and slightly disturbing… but kinda cool nonetheless. Anyways, I’m happy to do your beta testing for ya
@ peter and shane - I agree with you guys completely on the fact that complexity has gone through the roof… so naturally there will be gaps to fill, bugs to fix, security holes to patch, etc. in every product release (hard or soft) nowadays. So, I’ll concede the argument on that topic.
Shane, you raise a very interesting point in how user’s expectations are often molded by the industry… I went through 4 RAZR’s,6 Nokia’s, and 1 random manufacturer (mistake) cell phone models over the course of 3 years and at the moment of owning each of them, I was thrilled. Maybe it’s the gadget guy in us all, maybe it’s our subconscious trying desperately to protest us from buyer’s remorse, but I really do think we’re conditioned to expect “less than perfect” as you suggest. I’ll also say that I think this is OK (to a point). That lack of perfection is what drove Apple to make a phone that breaks the paradigm of how consumers think of cell phones… and it’s what will drive Apple or any other cell maker to create something even better.
On a lighter note, I got my PS2 this past summer… I’ll say one thing for ultra late adoption, the abundance of $10 games is pretty nice and since you haven’t been primed for the mind-bending graphics of the PS3, it doesn’t feel like buying 2 year old games. Picking one up for under $150 is pretty nice too.