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Apple Tech Support Tales |
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 Wow - you pay $3500 for a laptop and Apple won't pay for a shattered screen.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, John Manzione's PowerBook's screen shattered upon normal operation of his brand new 17" PowerBook.
Now, if you can't open the thing without the screen shattering, then Apple should tell you this. What's next, you open the CD drive and the computer bursts into flames (PowerBook 5300 style) and Apple tells you it's YOUR fault?
The good news is that John's credit card company is footing the bill, as his more recent article explains.
I wonder if Apple would have come through and given him a new PowerBook if his credit card company wasn't going to pay for it? Who knows.
A lot of people claim that Apple seems to be more and more about the money lately and less about customer service and satisfaction. Mayble Apple's customer service has slipped lately, I don't know. I realize Apple is a company and needs to make money, and yet they also need to provide high levels of customer service. I'm sure it's a pretty hard balancing act to maintain, you would think they would cover John's laptop repairs.
I've heard a lot of Apple Tech Support horror stories, but I've also heard a lot of stories with happy endings. I've had a few interesting calls to Tech Support as well and I'd like to share them.
The Tale of the Airport Base Station with Enigmatic Ethernet
My girlfriend and I bought a used AirPort Base Station on eBay (the original model) and couldn't get it to work. I'm no slouch at troubleshooting computer problems and neither is my girlfriend. But we had problems from the get-go and knew something was wrong. After a long evening of messing with it, we gave up.
So the next day I called my Brother, who had the exact same setup as we did, even the same Linksys router. We went through the settings and compared them - they were exactly the same, but it wasn't working on my end.
He gave me the number of a good friend of his who happened to be an Apple Engineer. He walked me through just about everything and we couldn't get it working. The conclusion was that hardware had to be the culprit. As we could connect via modem and use Airport, but not via our cable modem, it had to be a bad ethernet card on the Base Station.
So next, we called Apple's Tech Support, not knowing if the Base Station would be covered. Turns out it was! The Technician we talked was a great guy, however he had to walk us through every single step we had already done all weekend. I know the drill, having worked in Tech Support before, so I acquiesed and jumped through all the hoops and followed his instructions to try to get the thing working.
It was a good two or three hours, and he did everything possible to make it sound like we had something set up wrong and that it wasn't bad hardware. I even went in to work to make a crossover cable and connect my iBook to the Base Station that way (later finding out that newer Macs have auto-sensing ethernet cards and it doesn't matter what type of ethernet cable you use).
It took my insistence that it could be nothing BUT hardware, my knowledge of how Tech Support people operate, and some well-timed name dropping about the previously mentioned Apple Engineer to get a Supervisor on the phone (I don't know if the name dropping mattered, but I'm sure it didn't hurt).
This Supervisor walked me through many of the same steps that the Tech did, and he also tried to convince me that I had something set up wrong. It took at least another hour before the Supervisor realized that I would not give up and that I knew it was a bad ethernet card.
We eventually got a new (well, refurbished at least) Airport Base Station that worked. But I couldn't believe how persistent Apple was in trying to make it look like I was at fault.
As a matter of fact, the person who owned the Base Station before us essentially got screwed. Apple told her it was the way she had her network set up, and none the wiser, she believed them. She sold it for a loss on eBay. I feel for her and people like her.
(This is a happier story)
The iMac With The Evil Metallic Arm
My workplace was kind enough to buy me a flat-panel iMac last year when they came out. It worked great for a while, but then started freezing up. No kernel panic - just straight up frozen. After the usual troubleshooting, I ended up reinstalling OS X 10.2. Still got random freeze-ups. The wierd thing was, it would run great for days, then all of a sudden would freeze!
As I sat there scratching my head about it, I bumped my desk ... and it froze. I rebooted and was able to recreate the freeze-up by bumping my desk again.
I called up Apple Tech Support and the guy told me it wasn't covered. Not covered? It was only about 4 months old!? Turns out Apple gives you 3 months of full coverage and a year of hardware - but they won't necessarily give you phone support...It's kind of wierd but let me explain.
Again, the guy said the iMac wasn't covered, but he asked if me to give him a general run-down of what was going on. So I said I could re-create the problem. I had the iMac up and running, so I bumped the desk. Wouldn't you know it, it still ran fine. I started bumping harder and harder, then pounding, assuring the guy I could recreate the problem! It was pretty comical, but then he asked me to move the arm of the iMac around a bit. Sure enough, it froze up. Aha! We had it! Apparently something in the arm was pinching the power supply to the display.
He said it was a problem with the early flat-panel iMacs that he had heard about, but had never run into before. It was something Apple would take care of, and all I had to do was get it to an Apple authorized repair shop and they'd fix it for free. (Which incidentally, kind of sucked since I live 90 miles from anywhere, but my wonderful cousin was happy to take my iMac to the Columbus Apple Store)
So I got it back and it has worked perfectly since. Come to think of it, I don't believe it's even had a kernel panic since then!
So what does everyone think about Apple's Tech Support? Is it going downhill? Should Apple have paid for John Manzione's laptop? Does this shake your confidence in Apple?
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April 26 2003, 11:54 AM EDT, by
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Comments:
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| iKen |
4/26/03, 12:24 PM EDT |
I got a good apple tech support/apple care story, I think I will post it later today... it fits right in with this story!
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| Jonahan |
4/26/03, 3:27 PM EDT |
Cool - I look forward to reading it :)
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