Apple Pulls Reviews From Online Store Product Listings

[hayesk]

Where are the usual Apple defenders!? This is a perfect time to conjure up a pathetic excuse for Apple. Indeed

Incredibly poor showing by Apple here, this is clearly due to complaints around their buggy iOS 13 rollout.

I can't stand online reviews and won't miss them. On the Apple store, on Amazon, or anyone else. So many reviews are "I bought the wrong one. One star!" or "The cable broke. One star!" And to be fair "Works great! 5 stars!" is useless too. No product has a 100% reliability rate, so it's natural you're going to see low reviews on a generally good product. And there are good reviews on a bad product. That's not even getting into sock-puppeting and review-bombing. If people wrote long, detailed reviews, it'd be different, but generally they don't.

Bottom line is that these uncurated reviews rarely give me a good sense of the quality of a product.

And for the record, I agree about the buggy iOS 13 rollout. The forced annual update cycle is taking its toll.

 

[BXRich]

only reviews you can trust are the middle of the road reviews and from there you can make a call on if you buy the product or not. I've seen reviews on Apple's site for products that were pre-orders which some were 5 stars and commented with "I just know this will be great, can't wait to get it" - really, you haven't touched it but going to rate it 5 stars. Likewise, I've seen 1 star reviews with a single comment like "the flimsy packaging really put me off" - nothing about the product itself, just a 1 star rating because they didn't like the packaging.

 

[PickUrPoison]

I like the APP, however even the small does not fit my ears, it is a great product that needs additional in-ear tips. I would probably give it a 4 out of 5 on Apples official website or Amazon for that matter. Yes, I own a pair, maybe an attitude readjustment. Some people do have legitimate concerns for their specific rating, its their hard earned money going to a product and they pretty much purchased their review.

What does any of that have to do with what I said: “What do you do about all the fake 1-star reviews for AirPods—a product that has tens of millions of satisfied users?” Yes, it seems like an attitude readjustment may be in order.

 

[jamezr]

What does any of that have to do with what I said: “What do you do about all the fake 1-star reviews for AirPods—a product that has tens of millions of satisfied users?” Yes, it seems like an attitude readjustment may be in order.

would you not agree that not ALL people have a favorable experience with all Apple products? Would you not agree that they should be able to post that experience and share that with others?

 

[PickUrPoison]

would you not agree that not ALL people have a favorable experience with all Apple products? Would you not agree that they should be able to post that experience and share that with others?

Of course not ALL people have favorable experience with Apple products. What does that have to do with what I wrote about: FAKE one-star reviews. I didn’t say legit one-star reviews.

People can post whatever they want. But they have no particular right to do it on Apple’s site. Apple is under no obligation to host reviews at all, and if they did, they could even remove all the bad reviews if they chose to, like some sites do.

 

[jamezr]

Of course not ALL people have favorable experience with Apple products. What does that have to do with what I wrote about: FAKE one-star reviews. I didn’t say legit one-star reviews.

People can post whatever they want. But they have no particular right to do it on Apple’s site. Apple is under no obligation to host reviews at all, and if they did, they could even remove all the bad reviews if they chose to, like some sites do.

not all one star reviews are fake.....
You are correct...they have no obligation......they only have their credibility and reputation at stake.
Then do you really want them to be like some sites?

 

[kemal]

They could easily highlight reviews from verified purchasers.

 

[daniel4]

Probably some kind of security vulnerability was discovered on the site and they probably turned off reviews so people weren’t impacted.

 

[roar08]

I'm not sure pulling reviews altogether is a good idea, but I see both sides of this. We have an app used by almost 100,000 people but we have less than 100 reviews and some of them complain about things that have nothing to do with our app. Reviews can be a great opportunity to get positive feedback and visibility into feature requests, etc., but they can be both irrelevant and irrational, unnecessarily and incorrectly casting products in negative lights.

 

[ericwn]

Absolutely. Apple professes to have a culture of feedback, but they only hear what they want to hear.

I feel this is a bit of a cultural issue with North American companies where instead of gathering real feedback people prefer to live in sugar coated bubbles of pure positivity. This doesn’t strike me as Apple only at all.

 

[DevNull0]

Online reviews are rapidly becoming less useful because many are fake, both the positive and the negative ones. Because most of Apple's products already have professional reviews, I can understand Apple's decision.

Apple's "professional" reviews are by journalists who's entire livelihood revolves on the goodwill of Apple to provide them with advance information, review copies of hardware, and press access to Apple events. Saying anything negative about an Apple product in a review is career suicide for these "professional" reviewers. As a result, they're all glowing positive reviews that are less useful than from random people on a shopping site.

I still remember about 5-6 years ago, Apple released a new iMac that was slower than the version it was replacing, and the MacWorld review was raving about how it was so wonderful that it was almost as fast as the previous version, like that was a positive feature. I wish I could find the article and quote it properly, I'm not doing justice to how insanely ridiculous the wording was. It was like something out of 1984. I haven't read MacWorld since.

As far as what you say about many fake positive and negative reviews -- ignore the star rating, read the text, and use your brain to filter what you're reading. It's not hard to learn what you need to. And a lot easier that way than from "professional" reviews.

 

[I7guy]

Apple's "professional" reviews are by journalists who's entire livelihood revolves on the goodwill of Apple to provide them with advance information, review copies of hardware, and press access to Apple events. Saying anything negative about an Apple product in a review is career suicide for these "professional" reviewers. As a result, they're all glowing positive reviews that are less useful than from random people on a shopping site.

I still remember about 5-6 years ago, Apple released a new iMac that was slower than the version it was replacing, and the MacWorld review was raving about how it was so wonderful that it was almost as fast as the previous version, like that was a positive feature. I wish I could find the article and quote it properly, I'm not doing justice to how insanely ridiculous the wording was. It was like something out of 1984. I haven't read MacWorld since.

As far as what you say about many fake positive and negative reviews -- ignore the star rating, read the text, and use your brain to filter what you're reading. It's not hard to learn what you need to. And a lot easier that way than from "professional" reviews.

Right, but this response (a treatise on what to do to find independent review information online) of why Apple may have chosen to delete the reviews.

 

[MacBH928]

thats a long way from the days when people were proud enough to post "Made on Mac" labels on their websites.

 

[seadragon]

Where are the usual Apple defenders!? This is a perfect time to conjure up a pathetic excuse for Apple. Indeed

Incredibly poor showing by Apple here, this is clearly due to complaints around their buggy iOS 13 rollout.

It’s quite noticeable that the usual crew of resident lapdogs here are silent in this thread and the other regarding changes to software development. But that’s what they do.

 

[OneMike]

Online reviews are rapidly becoming less useful because many are fake, both the positive and the negative ones. Because most of Apple's products already have professional reviews, I can understand Apple's decision.

Also, for whatever reason, the reviews on Apple's site always struck me as practically useless anyway. Amazon in particular has lots of good reviews by a weird unpaid army of people who seem to like to write useful reviews.

I don’t agree with anything that you said.

 

[coolkid93]

Apple appears to have eliminated reviews from its online Apple Store, removing the options that customers previously had for both leaving reviews and viewing reviews.

Apple made the change over the weekend, and as of now, no products on the online store have reviews, so there's no way to tell how customers liked a given product.

NO NEGATIVITY AT APPLE!!! We can’t have that

 

[PickUrPoison]

It’s quite noticeable that the usual crew of resident lapdogs here are silent in this thread and the other regarding changes to software development. But that’s what they do.

One thing we can be sure of, just as the sun rises in the East, it’s that the usual crew of resident trolls here will never be silent in ANY thread. But that’s what they do.

 

[cardfan]

So trust user reviews on rotten tomatoes. Ignore the professional ones who all somehow hate Apple and are biased. Got it.

Ignore the user reviews altogether on Apple.com. Trust the professional ones that are given early access to Apple products. Ok. Got it.

What’s so hard about this?

 

[I7guy]

So trust user reviews on rotten tomatoes. Ignore the professional ones who all somehow hate Apple and are biased. Got it.

Ignore the user reviews altogether on Apple.com. Trust the professional ones that are given early access to Apple products. Ok. Got it.

What’s so hard about this?

Consumers reports is looking better and better.

 

[cardfan]

Btw. Feedback for apps in App Store is just fine as well. That’s different than reviews. Maybe. I’m sure Apple can explain.

 

[KaliYoni]

This App Store situation might be what caused Apple to pull down all reviews. The combination of AI and predatory user behavior must have Apple lawyers' heads exploding.

"More than 1,500 complaints of unwanted sexual approaches, many targeting children, have been made against popular social networking apps in Apple’s App Store, in contrast to what Apple prominently markets as a 'safe and trusted place', according to a Washington Post investigation.
(...)
Using a machine learning algorithm to identify App Store reviews containing reports of unwanted sexual content, racism and bullying, The Post sifted through more than 130,000 reviews of six random chat apps, all but one of which were ranked in the top 100 for social networking by Apple earlier this month."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...xual-behavior-six-apps-some-targeting-minors/

 

[mikzn]

I still remember about 5-6 years ago, Apple released a new iMac that was slower than the version it was replacing, and the MacWorld review was raving about how it was so wonderful that it was almost as fast as the previous version, like that was a positive feature. I wish I could find the article and quote it properly, I'm not doing justice to how insanely ridiculous the wording was. It was like something out of 1984. I haven't read MacWorld since.

While I mostly take the Macumors web site for granted, Once in a while it dawns on me why I like and respect MacRumors as a web site and community so much.

It is really the best and most candid web site for apple products info and apple news (Good or Bad) and I love the disclaimer "This page is based on rumors and speculation and we provide no guarantee to its accuracy." LOL - Awesome 👍 "Let the buyer Beware"

Thanks MacRumors - Great Job 👍 Great Forums, Great Apple Community

 

[PickUrPoison]

So trust user reviews on rotten tomatoes. Ignore the professional ones who all somehow hate Apple and are biased. Got it.

Ignore the user reviews altogether on Apple.com. Trust the professional ones that are given early access to Apple products. Ok. Got it.

What’s so hard about this?

I trust user reviews/word of mouth more than critics’ reviews for movies even before RT. Whether my friends, family and co-worker's like it is a better indicator, ime.

Re: Apple reviews, they were no more useful or reliable than are Amazon reviews, but in the opposite way. Apple reviews are biased lower because Apple as a brand has a large group of online brand bashers. Amazon reviews are biased higher due to paid reviews and other review fraud, such as the reviewer being contacted and given free product in exchange for changing their review. Yelp is useless ime.

Airbnb reviews are useless as well, renters don’t want to rate low for fear of retaliation by owners, which would make it difficult to rent in the future. eBay has inflated ratings as well. Uber/Lyft same thing. The choices might as well be 4-stars or 5.

 

[cloudswimmer]

Well at least the IOS App Store reviews still work 🙄

 

[Unregistered 4U]

It looks like censorship in the purest form.

The purest form is if the government told Apple, and everyone else in the country, to remove those reviews. OR if Apple, as a government entity, were to remove those reviews.
As Apple is a private company, with the same rights as any individual, it’s more like not inviting someone to your house just so they can scream “poppyhead” at you over and over again. In other words, just a “good idea”.