Low bar for AppleCare & Sierra

[roadkill401]

I don't know if I am getting the short end of the stick here. I have 2014 iMac that has had it's set of problems. I have been told by Apple that the issues having with startup, bluetooth drops, facetime are all been fixed with Sierra, and not running that voids my AppleCare contract.

So I upgraded, and the problems still exist. So AppleCare then had me wipe the iMac and just load the OS with no applications. Their test of functionality is that if I don't have any problems with my iMac running Sierra with no applications installed, then the computer and OS are all functioning perfectly and their support ends.

A soon as I start to add applications to the iMac, then things start to go wrong. I want to use my mac for Photoshop, but when I load it, I start to get issues with Facetime and the camera not turning on. I personally don't like Safari, so I loaded Chrome and that caused issues with the bluetooth and the keyboard to randomly drop connection. The mouse does it too.

I was told on AppleCare diagnostics that I am using too many unsupported USB devices. YES, I USE A FEW USB FLASH DRIVES. but as they are not official Apple products, then they want to shift the blame to me. Is Sierra that fragile that using anything that isn't stamped with an Apple Logo is taboo>

And what good is a computer that you cannot use? Am I just getting jerked around by Apple?

 

[bcave098]

To be fair, AppleCare only supports Apple products. So if a third-party product causes a problem, you must work with its developer or manufacturer.

Running an older OS definitely doesn't void anything, but it may not be supported by AppleCare.

 

[roadkill401]

I could understand that concept to a point, but where that breaks down for me is .. well. The OS gives a whole bunch of library links to the hardware that fits underneath. So the software developer doesn't need to know for example what sort of video card is inside the mac, rather they make a call to a library that takes care of talking with that hardware. Summarily they don't need to know about how the storage is connected, be it PCI, SCSI, USB, Firewire or whatever. The library just lets them link and it takes care of how in the back end.

This gives programmers a level of ease as they only need to deal with the standard library links to write their code. It also makes it possible for one program to support many different Macs that could have totally different hardware setups as they don't need to deal with hardware end of things, the OS does it for them.

This is where the problem starts. In my case, I have a 2014 iMac that seems to work fine just as long as you don't load any software. Photoshop doesn't interact with the facetime camera. If I load the software onto my iMac then for some strange reason, when the iMac goes to sleep (again another function that Photoshop doesn't use), when the iMac wakes, my Facetime Camera stops working. You don't even need to run Photoshop for this problem to occur. So you point the finger at Photoshop, except the exact same software works perfectly fine on my Mac Mini. Works perfectly fine on a 2012 macbook pro. No issues from other users who have 2014 iMacs like mine.

Just think about if Apple had the same stance with the iPhone. The iPhone7 had a problem with the battery suddenly dropping from 40% to zero. Would you be happy if Apple said, if the iPhone works fine without any software installed on it, so therefore it must be the software fault. Would you be OK with that?

Or how about the new 2016 Macbook Pro. I bet if nobody loaded any software on the Macbook then it would not have had any issues with inconsistencies of the battery life. Apple could have said it was all the software vendors fault and washed it's hands. As it turns out there were some changes that got done with a patch to Sierra and low an behold the issue went away.. so clearly the OS was doing something wrong.

The problem I have is it's just me (or a very small non vocal minority) who have an issue. It cannot be reproduced at Apple with any of their test computers. if it was a software issue, wouldn't it be constant for all? If it was an issue with just 2014 iMac retinas, then wouldn't all 2014 iMac retinas have this same problem. No it is just me. But Apple says that since with just the OS loaded and nothing else I can't get it to fail, and their built in hardware test says everything is OK then it's my problem and not theirs (either OS or hardware that is under my Applecare warranty).