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AppleCare - How Many Problems is Too Much?
steeviant wonders: "I live in New Zealand, and have been dealing with AppleCare Australia over issues with my PowerBook G4, which has needed three replacement power supplies, one battery, two motherboards, a top case, and a screen replaced under warranty, and it now has another hardware problem. I'm not satisfied that AppleCare Australia think it is acceptable for my PowerBook to have nine problems in two years, and want the machine replaced, but they are refusing. I have scoured the apple.com.au, and apple.com websites trying to find some way to contact anyone to try to get AppleCare to reconsider their stance on this issue. If New Zealand had an Apple branch office, I would simply take them to court, but even that is not possible as their computers are sold through a local distributor. Surely Apple don't consider this appalling number of failures to be acceptable for a computer which cost over NZD $9000. Can anyone suggest an avenue through which I can contact Apple in the U.S. for help?" Sometimes handing technical issues defect-by-defect works, however it seems to me that there are many cases where it would seem to be a waste of time...both the manufacturer's and the customer's. Should manufacturers be required to replace an entire machine after a certain number of defects in a specific time period, or might there be a better way to handle these kinds of technical issues? Update: 03/31 3AM EDT by C : steeviant wants to let everyone know that Apple has offered to replace his machine with a 'like for like' model before this article was even posted. So, "All's well that ends well." for some, how about you?
Screen: Check
Motherboard: Check check!
Battery: Check
Top shell: Check
Power supply: Check
The only thing on that machine that may still be original is the bottom shell cover! Well, maybe the modem, optical drive, ram and airport card are still original too.
The video card is on the motherboard, as is sound, CPU, and all the ports. The only thing separating this machine from a new one is this one has known issues and a new one has unknown issues.
I would wonder if perhaps the owner has bad power at his house? Maybe that is causing all the issues? It seems curious to go through batteries, power supply, and motherboard and not suspect dirty power.
GPL Deconstructed
I've heard the whole sorry saga straight from the horse's mouth. He's come over more than once wanting to borrow my iBook PSU to confirm it's his PSU that's dead not his PowerBook; I've seen the ugly flaking paint that resulted in his top case being replaced, and heard the stories about the other failures. Recently I had him round to target-disk a backup image of his HD onto my G5 (which incidentally has the power supply chirp issue, and my iBook has had a logic board replacement) in the hope that his machine would be replaced soon.
Apparently Apple were suggesting that maybe he was abusing it, which is somewhat ironic considering I'd expect the HD and optical drive to be suffering in that situation, and those two *non-Apple* parts are still working fine. About the only ones that haven't been problematic, in fact.
My brother had run the gamut of problems on his 1st generation 12" iBook in the 2 and a half years he's had it. CD tray issues, logic board failures... he had basically every part of the machine replaced in that time. About a month ago the CD tray stopped working, he sent it in again, and it came back not entirely fixed. He pushed a little harder, and they offered to replaced his old G3 iBook with a new 800 Mhz G4 iBook with slot load drive (the model in the current line with the closest specs to his machine), and threw in the bluetooth module on there as a show of good faith. Plus, they prorated his 3 year applecare, and wrote him a check for the months left on his Applecare for the original machine that he won't use.
Again, YMMV, but my family has had nothing but good experiences dealing with Apple support.
I just went through the process of getting my iBook replaced quite recently (the new one should be getting here tomorrow, actually).
In the past year (I've had it for 15 months, but the problems didn't start until a year ago), it had been in for repairs five times, and not long ago, it started having issues again. Nearly everything in it had already been replaced once already, if not more times than that.
The previous couple times I'd called in, they'd hinted that they'd do something about it if it had any more problems. For a while it was doing fine, I suspect because I got a new logic boards after they'd resolved the problems they had been prone to. The new logic board was fine, but other stuff started to go.
In my case, I didn't even have to ask them about getting it replaced this time. I think it had enough frequent flier miles from travelling back and forth across the country from Boston back to Apple that I must've earned a new one. Although it had been fine for a few months after getting the original problems resolved (after a few tries and a few logic boards), they agreed it was ridiculous that it had had so many problems, and they voluntarily replaced it for me without me having to suggest it. I had a few problems with FedEx taking forever to ship the old one back to Apple so it could be processed and the new one sent to me, but everyone at Apple has been extremely helpful about it.
Without exceptions, everyone I've talked to on the phone has been friendly and professional, and they've generally gone out of their way to get stuff taken care of as well as they could and as quickly as they could. The past couple days, as I've been calling in to check up on the status of the whole process, I've amazingly been on hold for a grand total of under five minutes before getting a real person, and that's over three different calls combined. Except for this most recent time, I've been shocked by how quickly my computer has been returned to me. I call one afternoon, the shipping material arrives the morning, Apple receives and repairs it the next day, and the morning after that, I have a computer again.
Of course, I would prefer that nothing had gone wrong with my computer in the first place, but this is the first Apple product I've had this kind of trouble with (I was using my Quadra 950, from 1992, as a router until a month ago, when I replaced it with something that could handle 802.11b, and I have stuff older than which still works fine). If anything of mine breaks again that I have to talk to any tech support people about it, I hope it's a product of Apple's again.
I probably sound like a complete fanboy whoring myself out for Apple, the Great and All-Powerful, but I've really been that impressed with the people working there, even if I've been kind of frustrated by the whole thing (thanks, Josh, Glenn, Greg, and everyone else I've dealt with there).
(As an added bonus, the model I had (the iBook with an 800MHz G3 from a year and a half ago) was out of stock, so they're replacing it with the current model iBook G4. So, for putting up with everything that went wrong with the old one, I get a new toy. Huzzah!)
When my first generation iPod was getting only 1 hour of battery charge, I went down to the Fashion Valley Apple Store with a long list of things to say and possible rebuttals to refusals that I was prepared for them to give me. To my surprise, all I had to say was, "My iPod only gets an hour charge now." The guy asked for my serial number, then went to the back of the store. A few minutes later, I was a proud owner of a new refurbished first gen iPod with 10 hours of battery life. I think when it comes to customer service, your attitude and tone with the CSR will determine the response you get. Not fair, I know, but it pays to be nice to people.