How does one file a complaint with Apple?

[gsusser]

Sorry for bringing this up more than once or twice, but the issue has been going on for about 2 years with no end in site.

Others have complained about the same issue - when syncing to a mobile device, i.e., iPhone or iPad, the process sort of stalls at the end and says "Waiting for Items to Copy" for either an inordinately long time (1 or 2 hours) or indefinitely. I have a feeling my problem may be more severe than others because of the size of my music library. The various fixes mentioned here sometimes work, sometimes not. But that's irrelevant. No one should have to deal with this for such a lengthy period.

The question... how does one complain? I must have spoken to at least 15 senior advisors (I have apple care for my devices) and every single one has dropped the eight ball. All say they have no documentation that such a problem exists then we take various steps to resolve the issue. I'm on the phone for over an hour sometimes. Then, the advisor basically gives up and has me capture the session to send to engineering. They all give you their phone and email, but after one or two exchanges (if that many), they stop responding. I never hear a word after it goes to engineering. It just ends there.

There is no executive office that I know of to complain to. Someone once gave an address of tcook@apple.com. I rec'd no response. I left messages with customer service for someone to call and no one did. I emailed in the support section and got no response. What's next?

I will add that, in general, support is good. It's only this one issue I've had this mind boggling problem.

 

[AdeFowler]

What will complaining achieve?

Judging by the amount of posts complaining about this problem (here and on Apple’s forum), I’m pretty sure that Apple are aware of it and are working on a fix.

 

[gsusser]

I've gotta disagree. More pressure on them might motivate them to muster more resources to address the problem. It's shameful that they don't even acknowledge the problem. As much as I love my iDevices, if this problem isn't fixed by the time I'm ready to upgrade, I'm going elsewhere. Not out of vengeance - I would hate to give up on apple devices after all these years. But the issue is important enough to me to get a less problematic device.

 

[Gav2k]

Are we talking music or app sync?

 

[gsusser]

Are we talking music or app sync?

Syncing music from computer to device.

However, that's not my question. The question is whether there is someone to communicate with regarding the lack of support.

 

[Tyler23]

Sorry for bringing this up more than once or twice, but the issue has been going on for about 2 years with no end in site.

Others have complained about the same issue - when syncing to a mobile device, i.e., iPhone or iPad, the process sort of stalls at the end and says "Waiting for Items to Copy" for either an inordinately long time (1 or 2 hours) or indefinitely. I have a feeling my problem may be more severe than others because of the size of my music library. The various fixes mentioned here sometimes work, sometimes not. But that's irrelevant. No one should have to deal with this for such a lengthy period.

The question... how does one complain? I must have spoken to at least 15 senior advisors (I have apple care for my devices) and every single one has dropped the eight ball. All say they have no documentation that such a problem exists then we take various steps to resolve the issue. I'm on the phone for over an hour sometimes. Then, the advisor basically gives up and has me capture the session to send to engineering. They all give you their phone and email, but after one or two exchanges (if that many), they stop responding. I never hear a word after it goes to engineering. It just ends there.

There is no executive office that I know of to complain to. Someone once gave an address of tcook@apple.com. I rec'd no response. I left messages with customer service for someone to call and no one did. I emailed in the support section and got no response. What's next?

I will add that, in general, support is good. It's only this one issue I've had this mind boggling problem.

Have you tried restoring your device, restarting your computer, etc.?

I've never encountered that issue..not to say it doesn't exist, it obviously does, but it's not univeral.

As for your main question - I would email Tim Cook. Do it in a polite, reasonable fashion. He has said he gets about 700-800 emails a day from customers, and reads through most of them. I'm sure he'd like to know where his company's support team is failing, and it will alert him to the issue. Don't expect a direct response (at least from him, he passes the issues down), but it's better than nothing.

 

[gsusser]

Please, I shouldn't have even mentioned the problem. Does anyone have info on anyone to contact in the executive office?

 

[AdeFowler]

I thought Tyler23 gave some pretty good advice

 

[gsusser]

I thought Tyler23 gave some pretty good advice

Hah, I stopped reading after the advice about restoring my devices. My bad. I've tried everything conceivably possible. Wiping everything clean and restoring works sometimes. But again, it was not my intent to ask for advice about fixing the problem here... it's been discussed to death here, there and everywhere. The only reason I pursue it is it seems my problem is worse than others. Frankly, if I were ready for an upgrade today, I would shop around after blindly buying anything Apple for years. And it is not primarily because I'm fed up with the company over this; it's because an important function (for me) barely works.

As for Tim cook, are you saying he really read emails? I thought, at best, it went to some administrative assistant who picked and chose which ones merited answers. My previous email to tcook was very tactful. However, I'll try it again.

Am I the only one though, that thinks something is wrong with Apple's system when they regularly just stop working with customers without saying a word?

 

[Tyler23]

Hah, I stopped reading after the advice about restoring my devices. My bad. I've tried everything conceivably possible. Wiping everything clean and restoring works sometimes. But again, it was not my intent to ask for advice about fixing the problem here... it's been discussed to death here, there and everywhere. The only reason I pursue it is it seems my problem is worse than others. Frankly, if I were ready for an upgrade today, I would shop around after blindly buying anything Apple for years. And it is not primarily because I'm fed up with the company over this; it's because an important function (for me) barely works.

As for Tim cook, are you saying he really read emails? I thought, at best, it went to some administrative assistant who picked and chose which ones merited answers. My previous email to tcook was very tactful. However, I'll try it again.

Am I the only one though, that thinks something is wrong with Apple's system when they regularly just stop working with customers without saying a word?

Maybe they just stopped reading.

In all seriousness, yes, Tim Cook gets up at 3:45 every morning. He said in a recent interview that he receives between 700-800 emails a day, and personally reads most of them. After that, if he feels he needs to take action, he'll usually refer the issue to someone at Apple that can help with the situation. It's always worth a shot.

And I know you said you don't want to discuss the actual issue..but, alas..have you done anything from the side of your computer? Re-installed iTunes? Done a clean install of your OS? Are you running Mavericks? I'm not saying you haven't done all of this, but hey, what's a few more opinions while you wait for someone at Apple to get back to you.

 

[gsusser]

I re-installed iTunes on one of my many calls to support. I upgraded to Mavericks. The only thing I haven't done is change computers. However, prior to my iMac, bought about 2.5 years ago, I had problems also with my MacBook Pro. I can't recall the exact nature of the problems, but it was one of the reasons I decided to change to the iMac. I went to the iMac with the big internal drive thinking if I stored my music internally, I wouldn't have a problem.

Going even further back in time, I switched to Mac about 7 years ago because I had issues with my library even then. I have little recollection of what those issues were now. I doubt this has anything to do with anything, but when I was on Windows, I used MusicMatch, a program that has long been discontinued. Without knowing better at the time, MusicMatch converted my files from WAV to a proprietary format. It was a bitch getting them into a known format when I switched to Apple, but I finally found a program to do it although the author of the program had to modify it somewhat for me. Maybe that's causing a problem now.

I have a ridiculously large library - 1TB and 85,000 songs. [Many of them are duplicates for various reasons, but that's another story.] They're mostly in lossless format. When I sync them, I choose the option in iTunes to convert them to 256kb. Maybe that's an issue.

Some or all of the above may be factors causing my problem and maybe it will never get resolved. I thought that maybe it was due to having corrupt songs, but I don't think so. I've separated my library into playlists to sync so I could rotate songs on my iPhone or iPad. For example, I have 15 playlists, I think my iPhone holds 3 and the iPad holds 7. One of those playlists is new songs and I have had problems syncing this playlist too. It's possible that one or more songs in this playlist is corrupt, but I doubt it. I sync one playlist at a time and each playlist consists of about 3000 songs... except for the "new" which consists of 800 songs. I've had problems with every playlist.

Whew! I went from not wanting to discuss the issue to getting into all the specifics, haha. In any event, as you can imagine, music is very important to me - it was important enough for me to switch from Windows to Apple thinking that Apple could handle my library better. It makes my problem that much more frustrating. And I would think that Apple's engineers would have been able to come up with some reason after all the times they looked at my data. Or maybe they're too embarrassed to respond because they can't come up with anything, haha.