The Mike Moffat (#2 at Schiit) Blog

Discussion in 'Schiit' started by baldr, Dec 15, 2016.

  1. Azimuth

    Azimuth FKA rtaylor76, Friend

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    I didn't know Mike has the same birthday as my dad.

    Happy Birthday @baldr!
     
  2. Jerry

    Jerry Friend

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    Happy bday, o' father of dac!
     
  3. Ice-man

    Ice-man Friend

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    Happy happy birthday Mike!
     
  4. baldr

    baldr Schiit-sterer

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    How Not to Run Customer Service

    Hello there all. Allow me this time to recount to all a page In the book of my recent past. I own an expensive cell phone which began to fail some 3 months ago. I use this phone for business purposes. Because of this mission critical use case, I also purchased an extended warranty care plan. Thirteen hundred f'ing bucks. Funny thing, maybe I expected service and reliability. Several months into the life of the phone, the phone crashed, and appeared to be bricked. There are a variety of stores who sell and service these phones so I visited the closest to where I live, a mere 25 mile drive one way. I arrived at the store - the first person to walk up to me solemnly explained that this phone was a sophisticated computer. For that reason, it could occasionally lock up and a carefully timed button pushing with a secret sequence would restore my phone to a booted state – The kicker was I was told it would be prudent of me to factory rest the phone. Pissed me off, took some time and all was fine until…. Over the next several weeks this happened many, many more times, wasting much of my time with the repeated required fixes massages and secret button codes. I then searched in vain online for procedures to take care of this turkey without having to drive another 50 miles back to the store located in a mall. For me, there is a $1000 service charge to have to go to a mall.

    These stores have a limited number of employees per store who they represent as being in the highest standard deviation of measured intelligence. This would seem to mean their remaining employees, including the managers, are dull. Fast forward to the show I am currently directing, Jekyll and Hyde, the Musical. It turns out one of my actors, Spider (a pimp character) works at the same store I had previously visited as one of the formally titled intellectually gifted. I showed him my afflicted phone, he fiddled with it, and pronounced it mortally wounded and on the way to brickdom – he urged me to drive another 50 round trip miles to announce its condition as moribund.

    This is precisely what I did after Saturday’s rehearsal. I waited in the front of the store for one of the ordinary, dim employees to find me. I explained that one of his bright employees (I named him) had declared my troublesome phone dead. I was the informed that I needed to wait two hours to speak to one of their brighter folks. Discouraged, I asked for a manager who was even duller than the original clerk - he intoned that the customers awaiting their bright employees had to be treated fairly and sequentially, even with the slight two hour wait. I mentioned that I was a business user of their failed phone, that I had at my company dozens of their other products, and a mutual formal relationship and agreements with his company so that we could manufacture USB devices compatible with their phones and other products. Puzzled, he had no idea what that was. After a few moments of pondering, he informed me that I was indeed lucky as a business owner. It seems for the small sum of $499.00 I could buy a super business exclusive deal so that whenever I wandered in, I could be allowed direct line jumping to have immediate access to their best and brightest; the gifted few who could take care of my broken phone, since there was no online solution to my problem. It seems that the small sum of $499 allows complete f'ing of all of those waiting customers. I asked him if this talk time had lowered my wait time. He told me regrettably that it was now 2 hours and 45 minutes. With uttered oaths I left, vowing to remove my sim card and drop the offending phone in a pail of water. f**k them, even though I shall regrettably be forced to make all of my USB items work with their hardware while their market share remains what it is. Let you all be warned. We shall never, but never stoop to this elite idiocy at Schiit.

    In other news, the first article production machined parts for the Sol arrived last week. All but two were good, one being mirror reversed, the other with holes on the wrong side. 42 others were just fine. Right after RMAF we go to the foundry to work out the production details on the plinth and platter. This thing is really happening. Realistically, early next year. All production parts are now on order!

    The cheap USB board now seems ready for beta, after two and a half man years. It is our solution, we are now a direct USB licensee, not a prebought XMOS solution, our tech baby! I am proud because it took so God Damn long, even when the maker of our generic processor told us it could not be done.
     
  5. cskippy

    cskippy Creamy warmpoo

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    I still ahve my Galaxy S5 for this reason. I loved when you could upgrade your phone for $200 and extend your contract another 2 years. I'm just curious if you use a fruit, robot or a glass pane?
     
  6. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    This is why I've all but given up on getting top-tier phones. They can do fairly impressive things, yes, but they're even more fickle than my cat, and that adorable bastard used to claw me up just before pets and naps. Of course now it's the new puppy that clawed my arm raw just last night, but point still stands. Anyway, one expects something approaching longevity when you shell out over $700 for a glass-and-metal sandwich, but that seldom is the case.

    Extended warranty plans are nice, but given how much of a PITA it is to queue up and wait, I often find myself scouring the grey market for legitimate parts of questionable origin, working with technicians not officially employed by a piece of partially partaken-of produce but quite skilled all the same. Hell of a lot cheaper to boot.

    This is legitimately exciting for you guys! Congrats!
     
  7. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    I have sadly returned to flip phonedom. In addition to a battery that lasts about a week, I imagine it will make and receive calls and texts (which is all I want or expect it to do) for the forseeable future. I henceforth refuse to allow a f'ing phone to cause any more stress in my life. Lovely to have this option.
     
  8. frenchbat

    frenchbat Almost "Made"

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    [​IMG]
     
  9. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    Ehh, f**k that noise, flip phones are still way cooler than modern glass slabs. I miss my old Moto Razr V9— sleek enough to cut with a sidelong look, and the sound it made when you snapped it shut was very satisfying. I'm still holding out for projection tech to get to the point where we can have affordable holo-pad comms people can slap on the form factor of their choice. Foldable screen tech is a step in the right direction, but like hell that'll be any sort of durable.

    Might make it awkward if someone walks in and you've got... illicit stuff up on display, though. By which I mean reddit. Ahem.
     
  10. ButtUglyJeff

    ButtUglyJeff Stunningly beautiful IRL

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    Sounds like a "Disney" tier structure for "guests"...

    Wasn't Steve Jobs a stock holder in Disney? Oh wait...
     
  11. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    Don't care much about cool (which would be clear if you knew me better). Merely functional is sufficient. And the tech you suggest is not anything that will happen in my remaining lifetime, nor would I be willing to pay for it if it did.
     
  12. LetMeBeFrank

    LetMeBeFrank Won't tell anyone my name is actually Francis

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    My wife uses 2 of the aforementioned fruit phones; one for work and one for personal so she doesn't have to learn 2 separate operating systems (she had a Robot phone for years and always mixed up the UI on her fruit phone.) Her fruit phone has been nothing but perfect while my robot phone (my 5th such device) has been nothing but problems. The battery barely lasts 12 hours, apps are slow to open, and it frequently locks up and requires a reset. Her fruit phone 7 battery lasts all day with much to spare and never locks up or has any other weird problems. She is far from a power user however so it might be different for someone else.

    We did have to take her fruit phone in for a new screen at the special store with the employees of "higher intelligence" and I'll tell you these guys titles are pretty far off base. Being a hipster seems to be the only prerequisite to be considered "higher intelligence" in the big fruit's eyes. After a few simple questions the smart guy was looking at me the way a cow looks at an oncoming train.

    Now, I am very technical, I have two degrees relating to computers, electronics and networking, but I would never claim to be a genius.
     
  13. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    Haha, just speaking from my own perspective there, I can see how little people might give a toss about outward appearances, antithetical as that may be for card-carrying members of the Cult of Granny Smith. Whether or not I'll get to see that tech implemented with my own eyes is another question to ponder, but getting to play video games using such tech (while forgetting to pay attention to my perfectly functional glass slab) is good enough for me.

    On that note, I can't wait for June next year.
     
  14. crazychile

    crazychile Eastern Iowa's Spiciest Pepper

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    I think I just located my separated at birth Spanish twin brother.
     
  15. direstraitsfan98

    direstraitsfan98 D2Girls v2.0

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    Sounds like a bad iphone. The iphone 6 (regular model) had this problem a lot. If the phone you're talking about was that one I am pretty sure I know exactly what was wrong with it. The only way to fix it was to get a new phone from Apple.
     
  16. Cspirou

    Cspirou They call me Sparky

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    Service can vary between stores. I went to one and I had to wait forever for a battery change and had to deal with massive inefficiency. My wife went to another one and was done within an hour.

    There are also some certified techs that do it the fastest and aren't affiliated with malls. I would have done that, but the mall was closer and didn't think it would be a big deal. Wrong!
     
  17. Elnrik

    Elnrik Super Friendly

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    Contrary to popular belief, Genius Bar employees are not there to provide customer service. They are there to follow the edicts, procedures, and policies given to them by Apple. I've known a few people who have worked there, and customer service is last on the list of concerns when doing their jobs.
     
  18. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    @baldr, phones are powerful multicore microprocessors, integrated with all sorts of peripherals, the likes of which some full on computers can't dream to have. These are further driven by equally powerful custom operating systems. But they have a sickness that many "bright" and "dull" reps are afraid to mention. An all devastating destructive virus that plagues all of consumer electronics and may drown us all in electronic garbage: Planned Obsolescence.

    As far as USB control, congratulations! If you guys are moving away from CMedia and XMOS or something like that, I think you guys did great. That would be my first target. There are a few options now with much better processors from TI and ARM. For less, you get a lot more. For these kinds of things I prefer a uP than an FPGA for power consumption considerations, and in some cases pricing. Whatever you guys did, again, congratulations!
     
    Last edited: Sep 17, 2018
  19. Scott Kramer

    Scott Kramer Friend

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    Are we sure he's talking about apple? Could easily be samsung/<insert carrier store here / BB> -- Can't think of combo bootup codes for iOS... They are trifling a bit too far the jewelry route, but the iPhone8/7/6s is still very solid and supported w/iOS12 -- also they are really just cutting off support for 32-bit devices (latest iOS), and I agree with that (not seeing forced obsolescence...yet)
     
    Last edited: Sep 17, 2018
  20. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    I dunno about @baldr, but I use Apple. Either way it's a problem.

    My wife could not get her plan to change on her iPhone either, because xyz carrier had to release something so that abc carrier could be used. We gave up.

    All phones have a planned obsolesce issue. Don't expect much from support.

    But man do I love my iPhone: GPS, Maps, Wake-Up Alarm, Texting, Mail (Yahoo & Gmail), Yahoo Quotes, Chess, Amazon Music, ITunes, Facetime, Uber, Banking, Cupons, Yelp, >Netflix<, Facebook, Weather, Paypal, ...

    Hell, I go to the gym, hit the elliptical/tread-mill and watch my favorite series Naruto while listening on my PortaPros! Then switch over Pandora on my remaining work-out. It then synchs with my car Bluetooth and continue with my tunes.

    All that said, I know that 2 or 3 more years and the latest iOS will brick it.
     

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