Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

In India, Apple service doesn’t work well. As far as I know, most of Apple customers in India end up paying more to purchase the same products than someone in USA or other countries.

Why are we treated as second class citizens?

Anyway, the current Apple support process in India seems to be:-

1. Register service-request with Apple India over phone
2. Take your Apple device to nearest apple-authorised service-provider (AASP)
3. Give the case-id given by Apple India Support(in step #1 above) to AASP
4. AASP would run the diagnostic tests, if required, get the parts and fix things.

You might think, that’s a nice process and should work fine?

There are some issues in above process:-

• Apple India might not register your request and can get away by saying your hardware is overused and not covered in warranty anymore. Unless you are confident and technical enough to explain them things. Not everyone can do that.
• Not all cities have any authorised service-providers
• AASP might not be trained enough to deal things as per Apple standards.
• AASP might have broken process within their organisations, i.e. it takes them days to get details/approvals from their own headquarters and bosses.
• AASP might miss a step or two required before they can order the parts. If they do it, later Apple makes their life miserable by asking many questions. Eventually a customer suffers.

My recent experience with Apple support process has not been good. Read more…

I own an Apple TV for quite some time, I just loved the form factor of the device and figured out, it’s really good stuff. I could see all the photographs, watch all podcasts/videos and listen most of music, more often on Apple TV than before.

As we all know, Apple builds innovative products but at the same time, it does suck by keeping it’s platform very closed. Be it iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, it’s just really hard to do anything except the ones Apple wants you to do.

Anyway, thanks to the great community of hackers, who spend hours figuring out things and building some great stuff. Some great hackers came up with various ideas to open the closed Apple TV, well initially it was physically opening up the box but later on smarter solutions appeared. Now it’s so simple, one can patch (enable SSH and install some apps) Apple TV by using patchstick, it doesn’t require you to open the box physically.

I can mount my USB disks and use keyboard/mouse in the patched Apple TV. Well that opens to a lot of possibilities.
With the simpler patching process, a lot of applications for Apple TV started appearing, one of such products is Boxee.tv, which is a media-center application. Of course, Boxee is available for all other platforms (Windows, GNU/Linux, OSX, etc) but I believe, it’s the best companion of Apple TV like devices.

I have been having good time using Boxee on Apple TV. I can not only play all my media (pictures, videos, music) in much better way but also enjoy online stuff (music, videos, podcasts, pictures, etc), be it recommended by my friends in Boxee social network or various other channels/apps available on Boxee.

Boxee can download movie-subtitles and show with a great ease. It can also fetch a lot of metadata (covert-art, album-art, thumbnails, information, ratings, reviews, etc) for videos/music from various online databases (f.ex. IMDB, etc).

The latest version (still in testing: 0.9.9.5324 build) allows you to easily install various applications made for Boxee by community or Boxee developers?

I even noticed, Boxee can run applications that are based on Adobe Flash Platform, yeah Joost or MTV feeds/apps are Adobe Flash based.

The best thing, Boxee is based on XBMC, an open-source application. I think, it’s worth writing a post about Boxee, hence I just did that. Boxee.tv rocks!!!

Technorati Tags: boxee, apple+tv, media+center, xbmc, apple, hack

My macbook has started having problems now, after 29 months. It had some problems around an year back but I got it fixed at a local reseller more on personal terms than professional (via Apple Support).

Apple has great products but any great product without good service is of no use. Specially, now I am in a city where I would not find any Apple reseller or service-provider. I don’t want to travel to New Delhi or even Lucknow, there is no certainty that things would be done in time or would be done at all. I am not sure, if local service-providers are trained enough to do quality service?

Apple needs it’s own centers.

Anyway, it seems Apple is yet to grow in India. Perhaps, they would, since their products are quite competitive with other brands in India.
BTW! My macbook might qualify for battery-extension program, but Apple tech support and customer relationship deny that. They say, your macbook is too old (29 months) and battery should be replaced, oh that means I am going to pay at least 4-5 K (INR)?

BTW! I am quite impressed to see HP’s support in Kanpur, if not India. They are amazing, we have got some 4-5 HP notebooks and it’s really impressive to see how HP has been good to us. They don’t even keep our notebooks, if hardware procurement is required and it might take days, they would rather call us as soon as hardware is available and replace things on spot. That’s nice thing, they really understand how important a notebook is to it’s owner.

I was avoiding to write about Apple Service, but I couldn’t resist specially after being denied to the support I am supposed to get, even when I explained them how hard it is to get service done here.