Too bad IBM sold their great brand of product to Lenovo after which I started to hear scary things about Thinkpad. So when my last Thinkpad (T41P) retired last year, I became an Apple user with an expensive lovely looking MacBookPro.
That was when the Apple myth started to be busted in front of me.
Myth No. 1 – Mac machines never hang.
My Macbook hangs pretty frequently. For the last 14 months, it has hung for at least 14 times, making it once a month on average.
Some say that it’s all the fault of Fusion, a software from Vmware which allows you to run Windows on a Mac machine as a virtual machine.
Well, who can say that PCs that run Windows crash not because of all sorts of softwares that have been written by all sorts of companies other than Microsoft?
Myth No. 2 – Apple customer support must be good since their products are good
Although Apple products might not be perfect, I still like it so far. My experiences with MacBookPro hasn’t been perfect, but certainly a lot better than what a few of my unfortunate colleagues that had to use Dell after my company discontinued purchasing Thinkpad. Their Dell E6400s tend to die within months after the purchase. So I’m not really complaining about Apple products. I’m still a happy MacBook user overall. Natually, I’ve had high expectations with Apple customer support.
I was disappointed.
In addition to hanging now and then, my Macbook started to make strange noises a couple of months before it reached the one year warranty limit. I was relieved to find out that I’d purchased a 3-year warranty and was sure that I was going to need it. Last week was the time.
Before last week, the noise normally stopped in 10 mins or so, however on Friday the week before last week, the laptop started to make rattling clicking noises through out the weekend. Can you believe it? It was making such noises all the time, except when it finally struggled to go sleep if I was not using it.
Last Monday morning, it was still complaining so I went to Apple’s website and looked up their support contact details. I’ve found the number for Australia and made a call at 8:45am at 8:45am only to hear a message saying that “we are closed”. That’s it. It didn’t even bother to say anything about its opening hours. So I called Apple support USA. The guy spoke perfect English and was nice enough. I’m going to guess that he’s based out of the US or Canada. He didn’t know anything about his Australian support center though. He couldn’t tell me the opening hours of their Australian contact center. He then told me that my 3-year warranty only covers hardware replacement. If I was to continue to do any troubleshooting with his help, I’d have to pay $49.95 to Apple. What a blood sucker! He did, in the end , told me that the best thing to do is to make an appointment with Apple’s Genius Bench on the website which I did. Not too bad, but a long way from a happy experience.
At the Genius bench, a case was created for a repair and fix. I was told that there was no guarantee that data wouldn’t be damaged during the fix so I should make a good copy of my data. Apple was to order some parts and they would give me a call to let me know once the parts arrived. Fair enough.
I told some friends about my experience. They didn’t think it was normal. A couple of them had had issues with their laptop and Apple simply sent them a new one. Ok. Maybe I was just unlucky. Maybe my friends contacted Apple within their first year of warranty so the service was better which would make sense to me.
A couple of days later I got the call and was told that Apple would only keep the parts for a few days so I had to take the machine to their shop before the end of Wednesday this week. So that’s what I did.
Oh
by the way, it’s been such a pain in the neck transfering data from my
Macbook to the temporary Lenovo Thinkpad T60p that I’ll be using while
Apple is fixing my Macbook. While doing this I called Apple Australia
and asked how I can format an external HD so that it can be accessed by
both Macintosh and Windows. That experience was pretty good. No hassle,
no drama, no surprise, most importantly no charge. The guy again spoke
perfect English and was very easy to communicate with. He's great!
At the
shop I asked the guy who’s receiving my faulty laptop. How come my
friends had such a better experience than I? He said what my friends'
experienced hadn’t been normal. They were not supposed to get a
replacement straight away. The genius helping them should have diagnosed
the machine before replacing them with new ones. Alright! Inconsistent
customer experience it was.
(老虎於2009年9月）
