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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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The difference between Apple "Inoperable Failure" machines and Dell "Inoperable Failure"machines looks to be very small - the real difference between them is in machines that were "Broken but Still Operable".
Maybe they're seeing people who got their computers working, then discovered they were running XP...
[ducks, runs for cover...]
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I had the misfortune of having my logic board fried by an "analog" hotel phone line within the first year of owning my Powerbook. Apple swapped it out for free.
Free Airborne shipping back & forth too.
Once, in the late 80's, I was young and was over at a friend's house. He father had two of the old B&W Macs sitting on his desk. One had a crack in the screen and was obviously broken. The other looked like it hadn't been touched in a while.
.. in the course of the conversation, we started talking about computers and I asked him if his Mac worked.
We were playing with Legos in the room when the father came in and starting chatting with us
All of a sudden, he stopped cold and stared out the window, with his mouth half-open. I thought maybe he was having a stroke or something, but eventually he swallowed and said in a monotone "THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH MY APPLE COMPUTERS. THEY WORK PERFECTLY."
And then he left the room. It freaked me out a little. My friend looked at me and shrugged. "Don't ask him about those computers. My mom has a Tandy that she uses to do her work and every time we talk about the Apples dad spazzes like that, so we just don't talk about it."
I didn't think about it much after that, I mean I had this one friend who freaked out anytime you touched his guitar without washing your hands.. people are like that sometimes.
But over the years I noticed this more and more. Apple computer owners simply don't admit any problems with their machines, and when confronted, their eyes glaze over and they refuse to talk about it.
Friends, girlfriends, relatives; Mac Classics, Powerbooks, iMacs... I've seen it with all of them. The funny thing is, it's only the Mac owners, folks who just use a Mac don't seem to suffer from it.
I wondered about this for a long time, ever since that strange day in 1988. That is, until last week.
That's when I saw the sunflower. It's on the back of their necks.
Every Mac owner has a small sunflower-shaped tatoo on the back of their neck, just inside where the hair grows. It's about 3mm in diameter. I'd never noticed it before. I didn't know what to make of it at first.
I was fooling around with this cute graphic designer friend, just teasing her one night, and I saw it. Then I saw it on my uncle, a hard-core Mac user. Last week I saw it on our Unix sysadmin as he bent over to pick up a cable for his iBook.
Well I had to find out what this was about. I tried mentioning it but they all denied its existence. Just yesterday I went to the nearest Apple store and waited and watched.
Yes, it was as I thought. Every new Apple purchaser was taken to a small, gleaming white room with a curtain, supposedly to pick up their Mac. As they came out with their bags, some of them stopped to rub the backs of their necks.
Now I understood.
I also understood why Apple made it so difficult to become an Apple reseller: the store had to have "Special Equipment".
I have no idea what that tattoo means, or what happens to those poor people in that smooth white room, but I can tell you one thing: I'm not touching a Mac ever again.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing about the effect which OSX has had on my OS chops, too ... since I 'switched' to OSX (been a Unix junkie for years) I've definitely felt a general happiness come over me. I don't get bothered by OS stuff, I just see it for how it is.
... well, we'll see, anyway. ;)
So anyway, to cure my happiness, I got Plan9 for my BeBox, and as soon as I get a video card for it which actually works, then plan9 it is, baby
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
The great thing about OS X is that you can have access to most of that low-level stuff (although obviously not all) if you want, but you also get a computer that "just works" when you want it to, and that you can get stuff done on without understanding every last detail of how it works, and without setting up every last piece by hand.
/.)
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, but especially for stuff like laptops with less common hardware, it's just not worth the hassle of making it all work (And before you mod me down, I have actually tried Linux, both Mandrake and Debian, and this comment is based on experience, not popular opinion from
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
Apple failed all consumer reports for not adequately dealing with the customers calling in for hardware/software issues on X86 compatible clones people built in their garages.
I had a sucky sig.
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
Subscribers will see that the eMac scores higher than the low-end machines by Dell, HP, Sony, Gateway and eMachines. Even with a higher price it gets a better overall score.
:-)
They say nothing about it having a one button mouse, though
Also: the Consumer Reports website is an excellent source of information. Well worth the monthly or yearly subscription.
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.
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.
You just described me.
The motherboard on my first Mac died one month after the warranty expired. I wouldn't pay for a new motherboard. I told the repair rep that I'd replace it with a PC. She gave me a phone number. I guess it was their pissed-off-customer hotline. The new rep agreed to cut the price in half, so I bought the repair.
My iBook returned less than 72 hours after I mailed it across the US. Still works great today. Count me in for a new G5 / PowerPC 970.
I bought my first mac a few months ago, a 12" iBook, and it has been badass. It had a catastrophic failure at one point that rendered it unable to boot. I got on the phone with Apple and they sent me a box the next day. I shipped it on a Tuesday night, waited a day, and it was waiting for me at work on Thursday with a new mobo and processor.
Apple's custormer support has impressed the hell out of me, and this will not be my last Mac.
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.
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
Sure, Apple like any other business has limits, and has to say no to customers sometimes, but it was pretty rare when I was there. They had very clear and specific lines of escalation for all manner of customer issues.
Another thing is that the agents take a lot of pride in their work, and are given a lot of latitude in helping customers. Not only are customers satisfied, but the support agents are satisfied too.
I've tried to apply all that I learned at Apple to where I'm working now, and it's helped me be the best Macintosh support agent here, and among the top 1% of all agents, which admitedly isn't hard considering that 98% of the rest are all Windows product related agents.
We need Macintosh power. I *am* Macintosh power!
Apple is tops in hardware failure. Way to go Apple!