Some iPhone owners continue to report an alarming bug in the device that causes 3rd party applications to crash or fail to load and makes media stored on the phone inaccessible. Calling it a “tragedy of monumental proportions” given that the phone just launched in 22 additional countries over the weekend, writer Jonny Evans reports in MacWorld UK the “well-known bug means none of my third-party apps work, and I can’t access any media held on my iPhone.”
“Frequent requests to Apple PR have yielded no response at all – and people inside the company dance around the matter, or so it seems,” according to Evans.
First generation iPod nano customers who have experienced their battery overheating should contact AppleCare for a replacement, the company said today, after scattered reports of some devices with battery problems that cause them to give off smoke or sparks.
Apple’s statement put the number of affected units at less than 0.001 percent of the devices, which were first released in September 2005. The problem units have been traced back to a single battery supplier. There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod nano model.
Apple Magsafe power adapters have apparently failed at high enough rates the company is now offering to replace them free of charge, whether your MacBook (13-inch Late 2006), MacBook (13-inch), MacBook Pro (15-inch Glossy) or MacBook Pro (17-inch) is out-of-warranty or not.
Apple, Inc. ranks first in customer satisfaction among its PC industry peers for the fifth year in a row, posting the highest score ever recorded in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apple’s 85 score is a full ten points higher than runner-up Dell, which joined Apple as the only computer companies in the University of Michigan survey to record increases over their 2007 scores.
Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI, said, “we have never seen a gap between the leader and the rest of the pack this big,” but acknowledged Apple’s lead was likely affected by widespread disappointment with Windows Vista among HP-Compaq, Dell and Gateway consumers.
Apple’s score also does not reflect the customer service turmoil the company has tried to weather since launching iPhone 3G and MobileMe in July, problems Fornell expects will cause Apple’s score to level off in next year’s survey.
Apple already promised a 30 day extension to .Mac subscribers and those who bought subscriptions to MobileMe prior to July 15. In the wake of continuing difficulty getting its web services product firing on all cylinders, Apple has increased the extension of free service to an additional 60 days for anyone with a MobileMe account activated prior to Midnight Pacific Daylight Time, August 19.
Apple’s Enterprise efforts have been met with harsh criticism lately on the business front, but the company’s inroads to the luxury hospitality sector have been impressive. While complaints about inattention to potential security flaws and problems with Exchange integration have gotten much of the technology press’ attention, Apple’s Enterprise Sales Group has been quietly working to install its computers everywhere in the hospitality industry, according to an AppleInsider report.
Building on the success of its Starbucks integration with the WiFi iTunes Store, Apple developers are now working to build similar location sensing services for ordering drinks, accessing reminders and messages, and other services related to a guest’s stay in hotels and on cruise ships.
According to the AppleInsider report, hotels have actually asked for Apple’s help in bringing iTunes-style simplicity to their luxury accommodations. Many hoteliers are “struggling to reach the digital demographic” and “to differentiate themselves,” explained Bradley Walker of Nanonation in a seminar on Macs in the hospitality industry. “You’ve been to the Apple Store,” Walker said. “If you could recreate that in a hotel, that would be a very attractive place to stay.”
Yesterday we were all set to post about the MobileMe mail server crash and ask how it is new boss Eddie Cue hasn’t already fixed Apple’s troubled web services division in the week or so he’s been on the job.
Then the servers came back up.
All MobileMe mail users were only affected for a couple of hours, but it appears there were sporadic outages for some customers throughout the evening and continuing into today. Steve Jobs has promised to have the service ship-shape by the end of the year, but that’s four and a half months of potential bumpiness that can’t be good for Apple’s PR.
After a rocky three weeks since the official launch, Apple’s MobileMe service got an all-green status update Tuesday night. In a message to subscribers the company said it has established a dedicated chat line for anyone with ongoing problems related to MobileMe mail, the final piece in what the company calls “this new ambitious service” to become fully operational.
The status update also described a newly discovered bug which caused some MobileMe users to lose contact and calendar data on their iPhones, though the integrity of the data on their Macs and with the MobileMe “cloud” was unaffected.
Apple posted a resource for getting data restored to affected iPhones as well.
Walter Mossberg, the Dean of MSM technology writers, has pronounced MobileMe “way too ragged” to be considered reliable.
His frank and unsentimental review of Apple’s web services product goes beyond the launch difficulties that have kept Apple’s support forums humming with angry subscribers and which prompted the company to extend members’ $100 annual subscriptions by 30 days last week. Citing his experience in extensive testing and interaction with Apple’s support team, Mossberg chronicles a list of half a dozen problems that make the service tedious, sluggish and unpredictable.
Apple engineers blame Microsoft Outlook quirks for issues related to calendar and address book synching and say they are working on fixes for other problems.
Apple’s support forums are hopping today with customers angry about continuing problems with the rollout of MobileMe web services. The MobileMe Mail category has over 13,000 messages that have been viewed more than 50,000 times, with many of the messages expressing anger and frustration over a mail server crash and unexpected fiber-optic line problems that have left some subscribers without email access for as many as five straight days, according to AppleInsider.
Apple’s system status message acknowledges the MobileMe Mail issue but claims only 1% of its subscribers are affected. If that’s the case, the problems would appear to have struck a particularly vocal 1%.
Apple already promised a 
Yesterday we were all set to post about the MobileMe mail server crash and ask how it is new boss Eddie Cue hasn’t already fixed Apple’s troubled web services division in the week or so he’s been on the job.
Apple’s 
