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Apple Tops Consumer Reports List

Posted by pudge on from the if-i-cannot-say-anything-nice dept.

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!"

8 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. No questions asked by awtbfb · · Score: 5, Informative


    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.

  2. the truth about this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    We were playing with Legos in the room when the father came in and starting chatting with us .. in the course of the conversation, we started talking about computers and I asked him if his Mac worked.

    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.

  3. Beats Dell in my Opinion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Apple's customer base wont settle for poor service by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  5. Now THIS is Killer Support by zonker_rob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Now THIS is Killer Support by rfovell · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ...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...

      I've had nothing but good experiences with Apple Support. Of course, the best thing has been that I haven't needed much support :-)

      Remember when the Wallstreet PowerBook G3 AC adapters were being recalled and replaced? I had to replace one on my own a few months prior to the recall. I bought the exact same adapter that Apple had just started shipping in the recall program. It made for a tight fit in the AC adapter plug, but it didn't seem too bad.

      After a few months, tho, the wear and tear owing to that snug fit broke whatever board the adapter plug is attached to. This was just as the recall program had gotten into full swing. My PB was long out of warranty, so when I called Apple to explain the problem, I wasn't looking for any service. I called to warn them they were looking at a looming issue. The guy who fielded the call passed it to a supervisor who (to my astonishment) offered to fix my PB for free.

      That's not all. The supervisor called back several hours later, asking me if I would mind shipping my PB to Apple HQ rather than the repair center. I would not be getting the PB back, tho. On receipt, they would ship me a brand new TiBook. I did, and had the TiBook the next day.

      Soon thereafter, Apple started shipping a replacement for their replacement adapters. These didn't fit as snugly.

      Part of my story is luck and timing. The rest is explained by killer support.

      --
      Every rule has an exception (except this one).
  6. I'm not suprised by el_munkie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. As a former AppleCare support agent... by AshBean · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...I can tell you that customer satisfaction at Apple was job one. Unlike a lot of companies (like the company who's product I support now), Apple believes that customer support is integral to their business and outsourcing support to other companies in out of the question. (Actually, to be accurate, they used to outsource a portion of their support when I was there, mainly for call volume overflow purposes. They may still.)

    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!