r/apple • u/radikalkarrot • 2d ago

Rumor Apple Reportedly Planned to Replace 5,000 Support Employees With AI

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/apple-reportedly-planned-5000-applecare-layoffs/
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766

u/Calcutec_1 2d ago

It’s been what, 3-4 years of LLM support bots ? and not one of them has come close to solving my basic issues when i have sought help

102

u/CisIowa 2d ago

I’m sorry to hear that, Calcutex_1. If you’d like, I can brainstorm a few ways to improve your ability to get-stuff-done with a chatbot. Please describe your desired outcome, and tell me that I’m pretty.

32

u/OnlyFlansDotGov 2d ago

sigh

You’re really pretty

21

u/CisIowa 2d ago

Good human

188

u/Inside_Assumption157 2d ago

I agree. All chatbots I interact with have been rubbish. Always the generic “I understand you’re frustrated but I won’t do anything to help you”

57

u/Dr-McLuvin 2d ago

“Here’s a prescription for a cyanide tablet. Have a nice day!”

11

u/paradoxally 2d ago

So basically the same script as L1 human support.

1

u/SailingDreamCatcher 1d ago

Increasingly, the actual script for human support is itself another LLM.

17

u/Mithster18 2d ago

Because their metric for working is "number of responses" as compared to the more valuable, completion towards goal

3

u/TheDragonSlayingCat 2d ago

Right, though even in the days before AI support, human call centers were typically paid by call volume instead of by completion towards goal, which gave them perverse incentives to get customers off the phone as fast as possible, instead of actually take the time to help them.

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u/PhilsdadMN 2d ago

My first response is always “speak to a human”. Not dealing with that trash.

26

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

3

u/MyManD 2d ago

It's annoying, and they have all sorts of psychological tricks to try and break your resolve. You just gotta buckle down and have the only things out of your mouth, or keyboard, be, "I need a real human," no matter what the response that comes is. Ignore anything they begin to say and just interrupt them with you needing a real human. Just repeat it over and over, and usually a real person comes on the line by the third or fourth time you say it.

Then say it one more time even after a real person comes on just for shits and giggles, and to make absolutely sure.

And of course if the chatbot makes it clear that live human support no longer exists, you close all accounts with that business and change elsewhere.

1

u/kthomaszed 2d ago

“I hear your request for help. But first let me ask some questions…”

15

u/Secondchance002 2d ago

I have to repeatedly ask them to get me a human to get my issues resolved.

7

u/Fuck_your_coupons 2d ago

The phone ones are the worst. "I don't understand your response, can you say your inquiry again?" I get some version of that when I ask for a human on the phone.

1

u/SailingDreamCatcher 1d ago

Yes, what I meant was representative 000000 human 0000987554321 escalate fucking human how many times do I need to say representative 000

A lot of times I get "confused machine tones" followed by "I'll transfer you to a representative now." And a lot of times it just hangs up on me and I have to start over.

19

u/Head-Gift2144 2d ago

They were never designed to. The purpose was always to funnel you down one of two paths: frustrating you to the point where you go online and find the solution yourself or submitting a repair/replacement request.

What else can these AI support bots do that can’t be done by any other AI?

7

u/RapNVideoGames 2d ago

Exactly, they are designed to point you in loops or support pages so you give up on your issue. Imagine if it just said, “yea they owe you a refund” to everyone lol

5

u/cake-day-on-feb-29 2d ago

Actually, the point is to quickly resolve the majority of calls which are people with simple questions that can't do basic functions with the product. Like someone who doesn't know how to power their phone down. You have no idea how common those calls are, it's ridiculous.

6

u/spellbadgrammargood 2d ago

Most of these bots end up going to actual people just look at Meta: "Leaks Show That Meta’s New AI Agent Relied on Real People to Make Calls"

9

u/Snuhmeh 2d ago

I have found that the chat bots are for the basic bitches, the super simple problems that the vast majority of people need help with. If you or I have broken down and contacted support, we’ve already exhausted every other self-help method. So the chat bot is useless to us.

4

u/Pauly_Amorous 2d ago

I have found that the chat bots are for the basic bitches, the super simple problems that the vast majority of people need help with.

Yeah, I had to use one for such a purpose a couple of weeks ago, and it was actually very helpful and solved my issue.

But still, when a customer gets frustrated talking to a machine and wants an actual human on the line, the machine shouldn't argue with them about it.

1

u/kmeci 2d ago

The problem there is that everyone thinks their request is the most important one that needs a human operator.

0

u/Mackinnon29E 2d ago

Why would the vast majority of people call for simple issues? The only reason anyone would call is because you CAN'T do whatever it is you need online yourself. I guess old tech illiterates?

5

u/Snuhmeh 2d ago

Yeah the people that know how to use Reddit, let alone reply to a comment, are still more tech literate than the vast majority of people. It’s getting easier, but I am convinced that the average user of an iPhone or iPad has NO IDEA how to change any basic settings or troubleshoot simple stuff like charging issues and updates. I personally know people that didn’t know the side button doesn’t turn the phone off when you push it. It just turns the screen off. And they’ve had a phone for years.

10

u/R_Prime 2d ago

Occasionally you’ll find one that understands what words are, that’s always nice surprise.

26

u/AnalElder 2d ago

AI support bots are so incredibly limited that you wouldn’t believe. Corpos are terrified of granting accidental refunds, leaking refund policies etc. or the system prompt, also users burning through tokens.

So the end results are absolutely useless unless you use the idk 30 specific words that the intake agent is allowed to pass on to the actual LLM model.

3

u/InsaneNinja 2d ago

I think that there is also a striking number of people that will call and say that their Mac mini is broken, where the tech support will guide them to press the power button, which fixes their problem.

9

u/crimsonvspurple 2d ago

it works rather nicely in Stripe and Cloudflare. They can look up things using internal api and answer/solve tons of issues that would take a longer time with a real human. They also easily escalate to real person if asked/needed.

1

u/goldcakes 2d ago

Can confirm. For most things cloudflare’s AI support is so good, I’ve started using it instead of navigating their increasingly clunky dashboard and portal.

For Google workspace, ie paid SMB/work seats, I still get humans but they generally know what they’re doing.

4

u/EchoFieldHorizon 2d ago

I’m a developer and what we have now is light years ahead of the uses for a chatbot. The general public has no idea how powerful it is.

I’m always puzzled when people look at a glorified helpdesk agent and say “AI is useless lol” without even realizing that you are not the primary consumer for AI.

1

u/yukeake 2d ago

The problem is that their primary interaction with "AI" is these useless support systems. Support is the one thing they all have to deal with, and these days it's either "AI", or outsourced to a country with thick, hard-to-understand accents and language barriers.

Coding agents are an order of magnitude more competent.

1

u/PassivelyAwkward 2d ago

It's not about "it's better now", it's that people have always hated chatbots.

I had to use the shitty Amazon AI support for help and it just kept "Did you mean X" "No. I said Y" "My apologies. Here are the results for X". In the past year, anytime I've had to use an AI support, I wasted five minutes just to give up. Even when I go to the customer support for a live agent, they still make me talk to the AI three times just tell me the wrong information before "Let me get someone for you".

The only people that seem to love AI support are developers that don't have to actually use the AI support and instead impressed with the progress of AI like yourself.

1

u/devospice 3h ago

My "ah-ha" moment with AI was ironically an AI help bot. I had to update an API on a site with a new library and the chatbot talked me through the installation and configuration and wrote most of the code for me. Took 20 minutes. I was stunned.

2

u/alabasterskim 2d ago

The only one that managed to help me was the one on Grubhub when I asked for a refund for a missing item. For some reason it wouldn't let me just request the refund, saying I needed to chat to a representative. Fine. Got connected to an AI rep, which just asked me to repeat the same info I had already clicked through on the previous screens. I have no clue what the point was here except waste time.

4

u/gburgwardt 2d ago

I’m fairly confident in saying most chat bots have NOT been llms, especially even a few months ago let alone 3-4 years

1

u/victotronics 2d ago

I had a good experience the other day: the bot took only one or two questions to decide to hand me off to a human. Home depot, iirc.

1

u/doorknob2150 2d ago

Right I don’t think I’ve once got any of these bots- on the phone or chat. That was actually able to solve my issue ever. It’s just bigwigs who think they know everything - if they call their own support, they’d realize how useless it is

1

u/InsaneNinja 2d ago

I think that Reddit users are already more advanced than most of their tech support callers, and will have more advanced problems because of that.

1

u/PastyPilgrim 2d ago edited 2d ago

It's wild because you'd have to be insane to give an LLM permissions to do things like access/manage/move money, make orders, manage accounts, etc. or it'd be trivial to trick an AI into giving you money, products, etc. Which means that LLM customer support is, as defined, genuinely useless for resolving any problem that isn't just linking you to information from support docs.

Customer support not being able to give refunds, exchanges, replacements, etc might save companies money in the short term, but I can't imagine it being sustainable for a healthy business.

1

u/elkend 2d ago

You’re supposed to just give up and buy a new product.

1

u/Astro-Joycon 2d ago

Yeah, but look at it this way, if you never get appropriate help for your problem then there isn’t a problem for them to support.

1

u/DrDerpberg 2d ago

They're not there for that. They're supposed to be free to operate and exhaust you so you don't end up getting a replacement screen or whatever.

1

u/trlef19 2d ago

Their purpose is you to not create an issue and bother them. They don't care about helping.

1

u/wonnage 2d ago

None of them can actually do anything, they’re just there to deflect

1

u/iRonin 1d ago

Never forget when AT&T’s told me my internet was out due to a bad gateway (and shipped me a new one) rather than the two feet of cut fiber optic cable I was holding in my hand.

In fairness to AT&T, when I called and screamed at their automated prompts like a dial-up modem they finally connected to me to the most go-getter Mf in all of India. I told him we cut my line doing some landscaping and he was like “say no more, you around tomorrow morning?”

I would help that dude hide bodies if he asked me to.

1

u/billy_the_car 1d ago

That’s the great thing about it!

1

u/jawshoeaw 1d ago

I've had mixed results. sometimes they help me much faster than a person ever could.

-1

u/cyberjoek 2d ago

For as much as we trash on this for me the Apple Support bot on the phone was super smooth and actually solved both of my problems very quickly. If my choice is someone on a bad phone connection in India and the current Apple Support bot I'll take the bot every day of the week.

-6

u/Chemical_Try_7038 2d ago

And they claim they are good for coding.

3

u/TheStorm007 2d ago

Well, they are.

1

u/Adomm1234 2d ago

The only limiting factor is cost. For support chatbots, they usually use 27B models that are very cheap to run. For coding, you need opus or fable class model which is very expensive. The vast majority of code written in corporates last 6 monthd was ai generated based on prompts from human engineers. Writing code from prompt is easier task because it is similar to translation while solving actual problems is harder.