AppleCare is ridiculous
Published on 10 Jan 2008 at 3:16 am.
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Filed under apple, applecare, rant, repair.
I’ve pretty much had it with Apple. I love Mac OS and all, and in general I find Apple’s hardware designs are elegant. That’s not enough to keep me as a customer any longer. The machines are over priced and AppleCare is, well, bullshit.
My iMac which has worked flawlessly for just over a year recently developed some display issues. I took it to my local Apple Store for repair. It’s been there for two weeks now:
This is unreasonable. Apparently, they’re “waiting on parts.” I’d really like to know which parts. Because if this were a Dell, I could quickly and cheaply get a new graphics card and new display. But since it’s a Mac, I have to wait for Apple. Ridiculous.
And Bob… I’ve never dealt with a stupider genius in my life. Completely unrelated to my iMac issue, my wife’s MacBook, the most recent revision, is having the well known keyboard issue (where it stops responding for several seconds to minutes). Apple has released a patch which did not fix the issue on her MacBook. So, we take it to the store (having an appointment and all) Now, the genius that was helping us was new so he asked Bob for some help.
He tells Bob what we told him about the keyboard and asks Bob “Have you ever heard of this?” Bob’s response was insulting. Bob says “I’ve heard of everything. I’ve heard the moon is made of cheese.” He goes on to list five other ridiculous things he’s heard. Let me tell you what I heard “What you say your machine does is as ridiculous as the moon being made of cheese.”
Thanks Bob, but how about trying to fix the problem instead of telling us how ridiculous it is. In an effort to help, Bob tells us we have several options and asks “Do you have a back-up.” I respond “yes, we have a back-up and we’ve already tried restoring the system from the discs.” But no, that wasn’t what Bob was getting at, so he cuts me off to tell me that his plan is not to restore the system. He tells us to “go home and call AppleCare.” Excuse me? “They’ll give you a box to ship it.” Well how convenient. I wish I had thought of that before I drove to the AppleStore, that’d have saved me the annoying experience of dealing with you.
I could go on about Bob and how awful dealing with him was. I had really hoped to avoid him. I’ve been in that store several times buying things and overheard him dealing with other customers. He talks to everyone like they’re five years old. I know some customers need that sort of thing, but part of customer service is identifying your customer. I overheard him help one woman with a problem having iPhoto find her camera. He went on about all kinds of crap, such as telling her not to put icons on her desktop because they take up RAM. I have no clue what that would have to do with her camera. But that wasn’t enough. He started to explain what RAM was, and then he went on to something about the System folder and how some icons aren’t really icons they’re aliases and on and on and on and…
At any rate. Given the shoddy service and recent increase in hardware problems (the iMac was my last Intel-based Mac that hadn’t had a repair) I’ve had, I don’t see myself buying more Apple computers. I find Vista to be a very good OS to spite what some people may say about it. It may not be as nice as Leopard, and the hardware it runs on is mighty ugly. But, it’s cheap, and when there’s a problem it’s quickly fixed without dealing with Bob. As my Macs start to break down and need replacing, I’m pretty sure I’ll be replacing them with PCs.
