Message boards with consistent complaints about push email not working
Today’s big news around Apple is that they are going to pay one of the biggest dividends in corporate America to their stockholders and they will buy back as much as 10 billion dollars worth of stock. While this is great news for shareholders and explains what Apple is going to do with at least some of the 100 billion dollars they are sitting on, there is another group of people who may not be as thrilled with Apple. It seems there has been a persistent problem with push email especially from Apple’s .Me service on the flagship iOS 5 system. This problem plagues both iPhone and iPads and while the latest 5.1 iOS update temporarily fixed it, the problem is still out there.
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I first became aware of the problem when one of my best buddies from college started complaining to me about it. He is usually a Mac fanboy and buys just about everything Apple sells. For him to complain about Apple, I figured there had to be something to it. At first I tried to fix his problem for me because face it, most of us in the IT world are our family and friends first tier tech support as well. But after following the few elementary suggestions I had, the problem was still there. My bud had to go to the Apple store.
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Going to the Apple store for help set in motion a 5 month odyssey that saw him get 2 new phones, numerous escalations all the way up to the engineering team but ultimately no satisfaction. Apple claims they couldn’t recreate the problem and finally after getting all the way up the help desk ladder they said other than the offer of a $275 dollar credit in the App Store, there wasn’t anything else they could do for him. He could wait for a software update in the future that would address it. But don’t call them anymore.
WOW! That doesn’t sound like the Apple we all read about. But truthfully, what else could they do. My friend had exhausted all of their escalation procedures and they weren’t solving his problem. What more did you want them to do? That may be true for most companies, but this is Apple we are talking about after all.
With release of iOS 5.1 my friend thought his ordeal was finally over. The initial upgrade seemed to fix the problem. His mail was being pushed from his .me account to his phone the way it was back when he had an iPhone 3GS and no iCloud. The way it works on his Mac in his office and home. But alas after a few days it was back to the same old, same old. No push, no mail on waiting for him and missed messages.
Now some may say this is not a big deal. If my friend hit the receive button his email will update. But the whole “it just works” thing from Apple goes against this fact. To my friend and those like him to paraphrase an old saying “email delayed is email denied”.
In fact there are others who are quite upset about this as well. On Apple’s own support communities page I found 20 pages of complaints on this issue with over 38,000 views and 292 replies. There are more than several fixes suggested but none of them seem to work full time. It looks like somehow the mail app on the iPhone in iOS 5.x falls asleep and stops working. Starting up the mail app manually has it work again, but then it freezes “in the background”. It would seem from the message board that this problem has still not been permenantly fixed.
iOS 5 is out for months already and you would think this issue should have been fixed already. If this were another company (like from Redmond, Washington for instance) there would be people screaming bloody murder in the streets. If this were an open source based operating system, the community probably would have come up with a fix already. But not this is Apple, the wizards of Cupertino. The fan boys and cult don’t like to see or spread any negatives. So unless you one of the unhappy ones you probably don’t know about this issue. But it just goes to show you that even at Apple it is always not as great as we would like to believe.
