Update 26/12/2009

largely overdue, as usual and typical with me, here is the end of the story with apple and what came after that:

on 4/12/2009, literally 2 hours before I had to hit the road to the airport for my flight to New York, the brown UPS van parked in front of my building where it delivered not just my new (replacement) mac book air, but also an iMac.

That was the end of a month of pain, stress; a month potentially devastating for my relations with Apple. The laptop I sent to repair, a less than a year old macbook air, died and the lab (external, not apple), ed was no longer able to fix it. After kicking and screaming, apple decided to replace my laptop with a new one, and that then took another quite long time.

As scarred as I am (I am still taking tablets for high blood pressure, first time in my life that they found my blood pressure to be higher than normal), I am still an apple person. Why: almost exclusively for the OS. I am a Unix person and I find that with Mac OS X  the effort around it is minimal, the tools i get are really useful, in fact i use each and everyone of them: from calendar to phone book, from iSync to iChat.

In the end I am back on the apple bandwagon and now that I have my (new ) macbook air with snow leopard.

Update 30/11/2009

Still nothing from Apple. Nearly a month since I sent my laptop back and Apple has not replaced my laptop back. And I am writing this from a Thinkpad T400!! Well done Apple!!

Update 25/11/2009

I have sent the old laptop back to apple. For some strange reason apple couldn’t get it directly from the lab; first the lab sent it to me; then apple arranged a tnt pickup; and off the laptop went. Now I am waiting, there is no ETA, hope is all I have.. what a horrible experience. Anyway, I must admit, after trying the T400 Thinkpad with Ubuntu, I don’t feel at “home” with Ubuntu like I do with Apple: the GUI is not as refined, as nice, the look and also the applications.. I have tried 3 mail clients (including Thunderbird), but none of them compare with the apple mail client. I must surrender to this idea: bad service or not, apple remains the top of the list, and in the future I should try to have backup for potential failure. However there is little more abuse I can take from them. It’s heartbreaking.

Update 20/11/2009

It looks like Apple will replace my laptop after all. The happy ending only when I get my hands on it. First I need to get my old (now broken) one from the repair lab; then send it to apple and then i will get, so they say, a new macbook air.

I wait to see what happens.

Original post from 18/11/2009

yesterday after a phone calls, long wait, I was served by Apple a big ugly dish of corporate lies and excuses about the appalling service that I am getting. But the last phone call was really n the style  of scammers.

the “customer relations” lady, Sarah, has done it all. It has used all the possible excuses, all possible trick.

Unfortunately it’s hard to put in words what’s going on, but let me try. I sent my macbook air in repair for certain problems, 4 precisely. Poor battery life, screen was a bit loose and wobbly, the screen had a darker area in the bottom right corner and finally, from the corner of the unibody where the right wrist lies when typing, a small noise came, as if that corner of the body was slightly dislodged or loose.

The external company (AMSYS) that was assigned the repair, collected my laptop via courier and after a couple of days established that

- the body noise could not be reproduced or detected so nothing would be done;

- the screen was wobbly but this was down to tear and wear there was nthing they could do;

- they couldn’t see any problem with the brightness of the screen

- the battery would be replaced and it had been ordered from Apple.

The battery arrived , it was tested and then the speaker failed. Now please note that the speaker WAS NOT BROKEN when I sent the machine to Apple. They needed a new “logic board” and so it had been ordered at apple.

In the next days the update everyday was: a new logic board is needed we are waiting for it from Apple.

After 12 working days of patient waiting I snapped and started calling Apple until I spoke with Sarah, who promised that by next day she would have info from the external company and if no progress had been made we would discuss options.

Yesterday after chasing news for the whole day, at the end I was served this poisonous dish. Apple, like anticipating the possibility that the macbook is now totally and completely fucked (DESPITE THIS WAS NOT THE CASE WHEN I SENT IT ) threw on the table the “software problem” excuse: if we can’t fix it it’s a software problem and we don’t fix software problem.

So basically to a distressed and disappointed customer they serve even this sort of appalling excuse.

However things will go, the damage is done; I was not expecting this sort of treatment from Apple; and I cannot really accept it. There is more in fact to this story, if you consider that this macbook air, bought in Jan 2008 came already faulty and had to go back twice before t was repaired.

Yesterday I felt pity for Apple when the lady on the phone, Sarah, was using the usual excuses. She was trying to blame on me the broken logic board; and I was telling at her: but look at the call, why I opened the call: there laptop in terms of “computation” was working fine. the problems were body problems, batter problem and screen problem.

“Ah”, she said, “you had a broken screen, that is a logic board problem”. But I told her how AMSYS had rejected this because they couldn’t see an problem with the brightness of the screen.

See, when you get to this level, I fill that I have entered an area of impossibility of reason. This is a war of nerves, of a multinational twisting its gigantic muscles on a customer, a good customer, someone who has been and evangelizer for Apple in the past 7 years.

This is why this story is over, Apple has hit so low, that I am ashamed for them.

And I have already ordered my first ThinkPad. Soon all the apples will go on ebay. And if you ask me, DON’T BUY APPLE, the service sucks!