rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) (06/17/88)
Well my brother after much thought bought an A500 over a MAC or AT clone. And he loved it, right up till his 1084 went 'ping' and died. Now this was < 60 days out of the box! So we take it to the dealer, who says, 'oh, commodore won't let me trade that in, it is over 30 days out', so we take it to the service store, and find out a few days later that he advertises that he fixes amigas, but did not buy the amiga kit, so he needs my brothers 500 just to test it out, so he says. This is a store that does warranty work for Commodore, recommended by the dealer, so we figure we ought to be ok, but we were wrong, wrong, wrong. Geez, i shoulda just fixed the damn thing myself, i hate to break warranty, but i can do this stuff better than these bozos. So, Commodore, you just lost my brother as a repeat customer. You folks can NOT afford to do this stuff! Maybe you should hire Deming? I just hear way too many ' my amiga broke' stories!! It WILL cost you customers!!!! -- ron (rminnich@udel.edu)
Doug_B_Erdely@cup.portal.com (06/19/88)
Sorry Ron, I just can't agree with ya. I myself do not think that Commodore
products are any more trouble prone than Apple, IBM, MacII... etc..<However,
I will agree that in *MY* opinion the 1084 monitor is the biggest piece of
monitor junk that Commodore has EVER put their name on!>.
For example... a local company here uses Amiga's and just recently purchased
MacIIs for Graphics work in commercials, etc....
They have had THREE (3) of the MacII's die from power supply failures...
And Apple has not been to helpful in getting things fixed in a short amount
of time. <This was told to me via a gent that works with the company, I have
no connection with this company or first hand knowledge of this>
In contrast the Amigas have held up VERY well!
I myself think Commodore's biggest problem is for the most part, not quality
problems, as ALL devices will have some problem(s). Anything as complicated as
an Amiga, your bondto have a few bad ones. I *MYSELF* think Commodore's
weakest area is in the repair area. Most of the "Repair Stations" are
complete idiots! They have no idea what is going on! And treat customers
like dirt! If they (CBM) every want to see the Amiga make inroads into the
business circles like the ORIGINAL MAC did, they had better do something
about "service and support AFTER the sale"!
I myself love the Amiga... It deserves to "make it big", and we have made
alot of progress the last couple of years, but I can see where the big
corporations are coming from...
In a nutshell.... The Amiga is no more unreliable than any other computer,
but repair support could be better!
- Doug -
Doug_B_Erdely@Portal.Cup.Comvkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) (06/20/88)
In article <6637@cup.portal.com>, Doug_B_Erdely@cup.portal.com writes: > They have had THREE (3) of the MacII's die from power supply failures... Out of how many? > Most of the "Repair Stations" are complete idiots! They have no idea what > is going on! And treat customers like dirt! I found my dealer helpful but a bit pricey. The place quite a few have bought their Amigas from seems to have strange priotizing scheme. (On a HP ThinkJet, I had to wait for a few months to get a chip replaced.) I guess what Commodore needs is a network of repair stations that get checked periodically and a feedback loop for complaints about dealers/ repairers. This might help weed out the baddies.
root@sbcs.sunysb.edu (root) (06/20/88)
Came across some interesting stats in "Macworld" for July, 1988, pg 67: Percent of users reporting power/video board problems: Mac-128K: 17 Mac-512K: 32 Mac-512KE: 19 Mac-plus: 22 Mac-SE: 20 Mac-II: 26 Avg: 22% Percent of users reporting logic board failures: Mac-128K: 17 Mac-512K: 9 Mac-512KE: 13 Mac-plus: 12 Mac-SE: 9 Mac-II: 13 Avg: 11% (their number, actually it's 12) The sample set of users was 504 respondents. My experience with both Apple & Commodore equipment has been *very* good; out of the all the various Amiga's we own at Ameristar + my personal Amiga, I've had absolutely no trouble at all. This contrasts with my experience with Sun (at Stony Brook) and IBM equipment. Anyways, the real purpose of this posting is to put me on record as against the "I had one bad experience with ***, so I hate them and I don't want anyone to buy their equipment" genre of network postings. C'mon folks. Any manufacturing company in the world will have a certain product failure rate. Think about it for a minute. If you were making Amigas how would you do a better job? Remember, you buy the chips from a set of companies, cases from another, power supplies from yet another, etc. How would you impress your quality control goals onto all of your suppliers? And your suppliers suppliers, and so on. You can't just say "Well, they shipped me a bad power supply so that manufacturer must be bad; I'll get another." First of all, not all fallout problems are readily apparent. So you ship a few thousand units and then discover that C101 was manufactured out of spec by the cap company that supplied your PS manufacturer. What do you do, switch vendors and then field update all old power supplies even if the bad cap causes perhaps a 3% failure rate? Maybe you should burn in test your equipment for a few months :-). Of course not. No one would ever be able to remain in business under either of those conditions. What about second order failures, eg monitor failed because it was operated in a room too hot/humid, etc. Or perhaps the monitor was operated on rotten AC. Would you design your equipment for absolute worst case functionality? Probably not, because it can't be done and you can only approximate worst case. Not to mention that reliability/safety have never been really strong selling points. What I am getting at is quite simple: don't waste net time and bandwidth telling me that you've got an Amiga that went sour. I already know real hardware widgets fail. If a person is really interested in gathering some useful insights into Amiga reliability, I would suggest that they conduct a survey of a real cross section of the user community. Just because even a few monitors went sour in the hands of Usenetters doesn't mean that Commodore has a problem. Rick Spanbauer SUNY/Stony Brook (& Ameristar) Standard nondisclosure: my opinions are my own; they do not in any way represent the official policy of either State University of New York or Ameristar Technology.
rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) (06/21/88)
In article <6637@cup.portal.com> Doug_B_Erdely@cup.portal.com writes: >Sorry Ron, I just can't agree with ya. I myself do not think that Commodore >products are any more trouble prone than Apple, IBM, MacII... etc..<However, Well, to this and all the other letters disagreeing with me, ..., you are right re. the 'things break' argument. I agree. I was not really mad when the 1084 broke. That i saved up for a company called General Services, Inc. of Newark, Delaware. They don't have any spare parts, they had to take my brother's amiga to test the monitor (i.e. they don't know you can hook it up to a vcr for a minimal test), so in effect they take C='s warranty money and deliver awful service in return. My secondary anger is reserved for Castle Video, of Newark, De. They are the only amiga dealer in Delaware, and i think they are the reason that people get turned off to the amiga. Their service ain't great, they really don't understand the machine, and i in general do NOT like them. Finally i save a little anger for C=. The machine was not 60 days out of the box; surely C= can let the dealer trade a junk monitor STILL IN WARRANTY so that a customer can continue to get work done. The dealer claimed that there was no way we could trade that monitor. I think this policy hurts commodore. Well, as things stands my brother is out his A500 going on 3 weeks now. No end in sight; the part is still on order. And, the warranty on the rest of his stuff is effectively cut to 60 days, instead of 90, as the machine has been unusable for the last few weeks. ron -- ron (rminnich@udel.edu)
elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) (06/22/88)
In message <612@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu>, vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) says: >I guess what Commodore needs is a network of repair stations that get >checked periodically and a feedback loop for complaints about dealers/ >repairers. This might help weed out the baddies. Commodore has a problem -- a shortage of dealers. More stringent standards will not help Commodore unless they offer support services, such as employee training, to help dealers cope with such standards. It is standard practice with most business machine manufacturers (copiers, etc.) that their service personel attend a short course on how to repair their machines. Are Amigas business machines? I dunno... If Commodore is to improve its service network (which I think most of us will agree is necessary), they'll have to use the carrot, as well as the stick. Else, the mule is likely to just run away & leave Commodore completely in the lurch. -- Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"