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Apple Tops Consumer Reports List
memoryhole writes "It seems Apple has come out on top in recent Consumer Reports surveys regarding technical support and hardware failure. Way to go Apple!"
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Apple's response to my bitching about not getting iLife with my new 12" PB was to send me 3 copies immediately.
Dell's response to my having to unplug a new harddrive to get XP to install to a "c" drive on my new Dell was, "it's an OEM version of XP, that's what you'll have to do".
Last Dell I'm buying. Last Windows machine.
I've worked repairing Toshiba, Compaq and Apple laptops.
customers who have problems with their Tosh. or Compaq laptops are by far more laid back about delays in service and rarely complain about cost of repairs.
where as when anything goes wrong with an Apple laptop it's far more frequent to get a customer that'll complain like their throats ben cut.
it's quite funny sometimes when they get all riled up and resort to the old "I'm gonna trade it in for a PC" line. when I know the service procedures for other manufacturers is nowhere near as streamlined as Apple's
I have been a mac user for years and their customer support has been very good, until now. I go to buy a 15" powerbook last week and i find out that i am not qualified to receive anything out of AppleCare because i am (a) a student and (b) a resident of Florida. The guy couldn't explain to me why, but thats what he told me. He told me i am unqualified to receive support from apple because i'm a floridian college student. WTF? Does anyone know about this? I thought they had good customer service before. But now i'm not so sure. Why they would say "yeah, we'll give support to this child in new york, or this parent in washington state, but forget those floridian college students"?
I got a Pismo PowerBook (my 2nd) off Ebay and it arrived with bright blue lines in the screen For those who don't know, a screen swap is $1050 and up. The Seller, Ebay, Paypal, Trust-E, all offered nothing -- zero help from any of them. Insurance I paid for on the shipment was denied by the carrier.
I was so bummed I thought I would call Apple, just to learn if I had been ripped off by the seller, or if the multiple verticle blue lines in the display could have in fact been a shipping issue.
I called Apple and talked first to a CSR who chuckled when she looked up my name because of the many Macs I own. Then she forwarded me to a tech, who spent 45 minutes explaining the details of how my problem could have possibly been caused in shipping, but was not a certainty. But, since I did not buy it from an authourized reseller, I was SOL on warranty work. I told him he blew my mind with his kindness in speaking to me for so long for free. Then we hung up.
20 minutes later the tech called back and said they would take a look at it "just to see" if it was an Apple problem, and I would see a pre-labelled post-paid return shipping box in the mail tomorrow. I sent it in and FOUR DAYS LATER had my Pismo back in hand with a brand new screen at no charge.
My next computer? Guess.
I had to have my iBook(2001) serviced because it was having this wierd problem where the Airport reception was dependant on the angle of the screen hinge. I had already figured out that it was probably a pinched wire in the hinge, so I took it to the Genius Bar at my local Apple store. I showed them the problem, they decided that it needed to go to the repair depot to be fixed. They warned me it might take up to two weeks.
I left it with them on a Saturday. They packed it and shipped it out on Monday, on Tuesday it got to the repair depot, they replaced the antenna wire and shipped back out the same day. I had it back in my grubby little hands on Wednesday morning. They even gave me a tracking number to follow the progress of my repair. I was very impressed.
They did, however, decide that I had a "software fault" as well, so they reformatted my hard drive and I had to restore from a backup. They warned me that might happen, though, so it wasn't a big deal.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Would QC efficiency be higher if you make more products? I really don't know, and I don't care as long as I'm not within the percentage who are hit, regardless if it's Apple or Dell.
In my experience, PC manufacturers won't do anything about 3rd party hardware; they tend to not do anything for tech support until it's gone. The only issue would be with things that failed so badly as to hurt other components in the computer; a rare case to say the least (although I have seen it happen). As for QC, it tends to be independent of number of products made. QC efficiency is probably similar: you pull a certain percentage of products off the line and test them, no matter what the number of products shipping is. Better QC comes from testing more products, but that cuts into your bottom line.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I got an iBook in May 2002 for Graduation from my parents. I used it everywhere.
:)
Around December I was sitting in my dorm at college and leaned the chair back on the power plug (the part that goes into the ibook with the colored ring) and squashed it. I tried to make it circle again and it fit with some pushing. I got home for xmas break and one day went to pull out the power adapter from the ibook. The bare leads ripped out of the adapter, beckoning me with certain death at the hands of Apple.
I called AppleCare, as I was still under my 1yr factory warranty. They sent me a brand new adapter in a postage-paid returnable box. All was well.
Around March my new power adapter stopped working on me. I did the same thing and got a brand new one in the mail. Soon thereafter my batter y started holding no more than about a 20 minute charge. After calling AppleCare and talking with some awesomely helpful techs I got a brand new ibook battery for free in a postage-paid returnable box.
Finally, last month my hard drive started making a "clicking" noise when I tried to edit this one song in iTunes. I called AppleCare and they advised me to bring it to the Knox Street Apple Store to get it looked at. I brought it in and they told me that the hard drive was on its last legs (which I already figured out by the clicking, but wanted to be sure) It was sent off on Friday, May 2 right before the big iPod party. I got it back on the wendesday the next week.
I looked at the work order attached, and not only had they given me a new hard drive, but also swapped me out a new logic board...just to be nice
Conclusion: I rave about Apples and how they work so great, but one of the best parts is that when they don't work, the support is a dream.
Yours panics that much? I've only had a few in a couple years.
And even then I wouldn't call it a panic; the computer responded quite bravely. Ok that was lame...
I've only had one kernel panic since I started using the original OS X release. I also support five other Macs, none of which has experienced one yet. I finally saw one in CompUSA recently, so I know that the kernel panics now are a lot prettier than they were on 10.0. :-)
My contacts with Apple support over the last 10+ years have been 99% excellent.
In fact, yesterday I called Apple because the cord on my iPod remote had started to tear near the plug. I honestly thought they would just tell me tough luck because it was mostly a cosmetic issue.
The tech said they would be glad to send me a new one and it would arrive in 3-5 days. It arrived at my house no more than 18 HOURS later! Granted, some of that has to do with proximity (California->Oregon), but they sent it Airborne, when I would have been happy to get it in a week with ground shipping.
I read posts about bad Apple service occasionally, but all I can say is that it probably just really bad luck or the caller was a royal pain in the arse to the rep on the phone.
Like puzzle games? Warehouse51 for iOS
Indeed - I've had 2 panics, both because I pulled-out a PowerMate USB controller after a put the iBook to sleep - but it seem 10.2.6 fixed that for good (I've continued to do "bad things" to my iBook, and it now just keeps chugging along.) Never had a panic on the old G4/450 though...it's slow but seems to be a champ.
But don't even GET me started on my Inspiron running RedHat. Feh! It's going out the door this week! Soon I'll be only Mac. Odd. But good!
Now to get rid of my Sun 5 and a box of about 25 Intel ProShare cards & cams. Anyone near Amsterdam want to start a porn site?
I kept AppleCare for my Powerbook 5300 for as long as they'd let me extend the warranty. Twice I had problems with the wiring to the display crapping out on me (they ran through the hinge, which always seems like a bad idea...) Both times I got it back via Airborne Express within a week at no cost, and in one case, I'm pretty sure they just replaced the whole display.
Another time I was running a Workgroup Server 95 (Quadra 9500 running A/UX) as a print server. I was having problems at 7 AM CST on a Sunday morning. Called the support number and was patched through to an engineer at his house (I could hear a parrot in the background...) and he walked me through the solution.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Here at my office we have a number of G4s, including a few Titanium Powerbooks. An older one (500mhz) was sent in for repair and it came back as a 667 (which was one model newer, too). Well, it broke again a few months later and we just got it back and it's an 867mhz machine.
Go Apple!
The hardware problem is Dell's fault. Not in your case with the DLink NIC, but with the hardware THEY sell. Everything made for them is made to certain specifications-- you're not getting the retail equivalent!
Michael Dell wants CHEAP hardware, and he gets it, at a cost to his cutstomers. Much like FORD has done lately, they've been trying so damn hard to save a nickel they're losing customers left and right because of producing poor quality (of course now they're trying to drastically change all that).
To your last comment: I've been the statistic you're talking about. 6 times out of 30 Dell machines. 20% failure. So the percentage matters when you're buying more than one machine.
even though I dropped it about 18" on it's side! It was a Graphite iMac DV/SE 466, the old clamshell version. I dropped it and it just plain stopped working. Even the molding on the front left was visibly damaged. I brought it into my local retailer. They asked me what was wrong, I said it wasn't working, they shipped it off and a week later it came back good as new and no charge! They had to have known that I damaged the molding. That it wasn't a simple malfunction. They didn't charge me anyway! I call that service!
Pooty tweet
Two days later I got a call saying it was back and ready to pick up. They had to replace part of the case but also replaced the motherboard, which knocked up the cost of repair. The fellow at the Apple Store noted that a call was not put thru to me to ask my "ok" on that (since it was more than we orig. asked) and crossed off the additional charge, without me even raising the issue.
Better than that, perhaps, is what happened a month or two earlier. I had bought a Dual G4 800 right when it came out, summer of '01 and got it with a combo drive (DVD player / CD-RW). It had trouble reading some discs on occasion, so I put off getting it serviced. Almost a year later I was 2 weeks out from warranty expiration so I took it in to Apple Store, showed them the prob and they said they'd get it replaced. Machine was serviced on sight and ready the next day...and indeed a working drive had been swapped in...
A working SuperDrive.
...perhaps I should've pointed it out like a truly honest lad, but instead I just bought a pack of DVD-R's and had some fun at home.
I love Apple. I will never willingly stray. Never.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I swear on my life I'm being serious. They won't support anything outside the GUI.
"What? You say you've been using to secure shell to remotely access your XServe? That's unsupported."
I admin a little over 20 FreeBSD servers, and a few Win2k servers that run Cygwin. This is a new one to me.
They'll support it if you purchase an enterprise support agreement, but you have to dicker with a sales person on the price...it isn't static. My client that has 5 OS X servers they wanted $15k (!!!) per year, or $6k, and $150/hour/per incident. So $6k to have the privelage to ask, or $15k to actually get answers to your questions.
In the words of my client:
"I feel violated."
Ugh, I'm a Unix admin myself, and can fix most any of their problems, but things like NDC (name daemon control for bind) are broken out of the box and we'd like to have work. Can't get support for it, and I've messing with it for months now. FYI, both NDC and BIND are pre-installed and 'working' with OSX.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).