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Apple Care Efficiency When Macs Break?
cyber-dragon.net asks: "I have long been a staunch supporter of Apple and Macs, however my recent experience with trying to bring them into my department, at work, has been disappointing. We had a Mac Pro (the big quad processor monster) die after four days. Of course, this kind of stuff happens, and everything else has worked flawlessly. I even dealt with the inevitable teasing about the shiny new Mac being a lemon.
Almost four hours dealing with Apple Care, three hours dropping off and picking up my computer at different stores, as per their instructions, trying to get this done quickly — I am beginning to wonder if Apple really wants business customers to rely on these machines. Much as I may dislike Dell, when my Linux box died it was fixed in four hours, and I spent maybe 20 minutes of my time setting up the repair. I have spent seven hours of my time so far on this Mac, and it still will not power up. Is this just me or have other people lost critical business machines to the depths of Apple Care inefficiency and lack of business level support?"
...for consumer support. It sounds like the problem you're having is that you're demanding the type of turnaround that many business-level plans provide. Yet Apple doesn't have a standard business-level plan in place.
The normal process is that you drop the computer off, wait a week or two, and pick it up to find it in spectacular condition. (Usually better than when you dropped it off; above and beyond fixing whatever you brought it in for.) The key is that you have to show a modicum of patience, something which businesses often can't afford to do.
Now that's not to say that Apple doesn't want your business. In fact, I imagine that Apple would love to provide corporate support. But you're not going to find it in their stores. What you need to do is contact Apple Corporate and explain the situation. Tell them that you've been tasked to covert your business from an all-Windows platform to an all-Mac platform. Explain that the AppleCare store plans appear to be insufficient for your needs, and also explain the exact issues you've had with them.
I would be very much suprised if Apple didn't assign you an account representative to take care of your needs. It might require a bit of FexExing back and forth, but you'll get support handled a lot better than if you try and take your needs to the geniuses (pun intended) at the Apple Store.
Good luck!
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You should try getting them to take back a whining 1st gen Macbook Pro. It took me over 6 weeks to get them to do anything about it. I think the turning point was when I told them "your tech support is worse than Dell". The good news was that I finally ended up replacing the machine with one of their newer systems that has a Core 2 Duo chip. I'm happy with the new system. It's quiet and it runs cooler as well. Apple's tech support is awful though.
User error!
What, exactly, are the symptoms of your problems and what have you tried?
Anecdotally...
In my experience, I had to spend 11 hours on the phone with Dell (about 90% of that time on hold) talking to four different people during ONE DAY to convince them to RMA a DVD drive that wouldn't read DVD's. Thank heavens for speaker-phones. Of course, that was as a home user in 2001.
In contrast, as a home user of an Apple keyboard that had problems last year, I called Apple and got to a real person in about a minute (including the phone tree), who had an RMA sent out immediately. Total time on phone? Less that 10 minutes.
Apple's enterprise support is indeed a joke. They're just not set up for that market. 4 hour on-site? Dream on.
In this case (line-ups at stores), your only option is "ProCare" which for $100/yr lets you schedule appointments in advance and jump the support queue at the store. No idea whether it's well-honored at busy stores like SoHo (NYC), though. One would hope, but can never assume.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
When my roommates apple laptop died, he took it to an apple store and they took care of it for him. I guess it really depends on the apple store, as I would think that like any other chain, YMMV.
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We've had a couple of problems with our XServe and its been hit or miss. We bought the spare parts kit, and it hasn't been the pancea its made out to be. For a bad XServe RAID drive its just fine, but when we had one of the system disks fail on the XServe, it was a nightmare.
When the drive failed we looked in the spare parts kit but there wasn't one. When we called them about it, the rep kept claiming that we bought the wrong spare parts kit. Only after pestering him for the part number for the "right" kit did he admit that there wasn't a kit with the spare part. The 4 hour response time basically amounts to how fast you'll get someone to tell you that they'll ship one sometime. For this particular drive, they didn't have any in stock and it took 5 days to get one to our site (and the delivery people tried to postpone it over the weekend because it was Friday afternoon). When it did arrive, it was slightly smaller than the old, so I had to fight with the mirror config to make it work again.
Not a pleasant experience.
On the other hand, last night I had a scsi raid card die on an IBM pSeries machine. The machine died and after doing diagnostics and sending a report in (at 10:45) I spoke to a rep at 11 and because it was in the middle of the night it took a little longer, but the card was at our site by 4am and we up and running by 5:30.
It's still a silly decision to try to use Macs for mission-critical business machines for just this reason. In my business, if I have a machine go down, I either run down to my local parts store to get the part I need, or I run down to the thrift store and pick up another used beige box for $50. Having a machine down for weeks in not an option. Having a machine down for days, even, is unacceptable in my small business.
Now, if you have some fancy design business, where deadlines are measured in weeks or months, as opposed to minutes as they are in retail, then sure, you can probably afford to ship off a box and wait for a few weeks until it gets fixed. Unfortunately, that's not a luxury that many smaller businesses can afford.
This is what true "lock-in" (hardware AND software) looks like in the IT industry, and it's not pretty.
I don't respond to AC's.
I had a dual proc g5 tower that never really worked quite right and would lock up now and then. We bought 3 of them at once and the other 2 never had a problem. It took close to 8 months to get the problem solved and in the meantime I had to go out and buy another one as having people try to do work on a flaky machine is pretty hard to do.
They pretty much replaced everything by the time they were done with it. One of the last techs just happened to have a new verision of the diagnostic disks that identified a bad cpu or something. After that the machine was flawless.
But 8 months of back and forth with the local store not being able to find the problem and apple saying there is nothing wrong with it was pretty annoying. Something like that with dell would have take a couple of trips best case before they just replaced it.
For what an apple costs compared to a PC they should be more responsive.
I was previously the CTO of a small marketing agency in NYC. We were an all-Mac shop. When we had serious trouble, calling Apple was not helpful. We came to rely on local companies like TekServe for business-critical support (though it's not cheap). Consider this free advertising for them: they were great.
If you use Macs in business, I strongly advise you to find a local shop of Mac experts and rely on them.
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Apple seems to be particularly bad about inventorying spare parts. Spares allocated to repairs are "unproductive" assets. Everytime I've had anything break on a Mac I first have to go through the painful consumer-type customer service, then argue for at least 20 minutes that we have paid for on-site service. Finally, they indicate that the parts are back ordered and it might be week or more before we can get a replacement.
Maybe if it was some obscure part (xraid motherboard or old hardware) I could understand. But we got the same response when it was a standard MacPro diskdrive and on another occasion a power supply.
Basically I would say that apple support is NOT ACCEPTABLE for busines use.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data." Whatever your personal experiences, they are not really useful data for a person objectively trying to determine the reliability of systems. People here can trade anecdotes all day and tell you how two different Samsung laptops lit on fire killing family members or whatever. What is useful, however, is actually looking at the independent reviews by manufacturer and support/computer type and seeing how they actually do with large sample sets and documented methodologies. It is not like there is even a lot of debate among said studies. Apple and Lenovo (IBM is long gone neighbor) consistently rank at the top of the heap. Historically, Dell has been near or at the bottom, although they have improved a lot for laptops last year. One of your "best picks," HP has consistently ranked as the worst in the industry for many years running.
You might want to consider in future posting titles more like "My Apples are flakey." That at least is true. Objectively speaking all the evidence indicates Apple machines are among the least "flakey" in the industry and claiming otherwise is simply your own subjective opinion based upon not enough data to count.
But of course everybody's MMV. But over the past 15 years I've had to call apple for support and it's always been great (note: I only buy Applecare for portables). With two exceptions, within a few minutes I've been scheduled for a box to be sent out (or a replacement part, e.g. a power adaptor). Painless. The two exceptions were, well, exceptional:
1 - I spilled tea into my 2400c while in Japan. Luckily I was in Tokyo and the machine had been built in Japan (at that time most were still built in the USA) and Applecare called over and then sent me over to somewhere in the Akihabara where someone fixed my machine as I watched.
2 - My machine went completely bonkers because the PCI bridge fried. How do I know? Err, a friend in Apple's hardware group diagnosed it for me (and cloned my disk for me!). Then I called, described only the symptoms, and politely went through the "fixit" script with the guy on the phone (try to restart, try a reset, etc etc). That was my longest call and still not incredibly long.
Enterprisesupport has been different. I've only called for support on my Xserve three or four times but each time I got a phone call (or once mail) from someone in the engineering group. In fact one time I was on hold for a while because the tech at the other end went into a machine room, reconfigured a machine and duped the problem while I was on the phone (it was a booting problem when the a homedir was on a SAN disk). Pretty good.
IBM's support has been quite good too, but they're about the only other one.
Of course ideally the machines would never break and then support could be crappy or nonexistant...but nobody would know!
I spent the summer I earned my hardware certifications working as a university Mac hardware tech in the same room as a university Windows hardware tech. The thing I noticed is Dell's corporate support is on average much better than Apple corporate support, especiallya bouts ending out techs to your location, and that Apple's personal computer support is much better on average than Dell's.
I watched the Window's hardware guy get his Dell hardware certifications to try and make his job dealing with Dell easier and still he got jacked around, lied to and screwed with. Make no mistake, this guy is a good hardware tech and has good people skills. But Dell's personal computer service support is just plain bad. On the other hand when I talk to Dell corporate support they are most often helpful and quick to send out parts. The Nebraska Federation for the Blind, as an example, figured this out long ago, let their members buy Dell computers through them so their members get corporate support.
With Apple they usually only send parts to Apple certified techs so most people have to take their Macs to a Mac certified tech. Then you are at the mercy of the quality of the tech, this usually good but can be bad unfortunately.
I think scale applies here, Dell sells a lot more computers than Apple, they can afford to set up techs employed directly by Dell to do service calls. Apple sells fewer computers so until the last few years most hardware repair guys who were Mac certified repaired Mac and other hardware as well in shops or as freelancers. That being said, it often comes down to the quality of the techs you are dealing with, no matter what company supports your computer. I make extra money by doing support/repair work for a variety of desktop hardware and much of my business comes from people frustrated with their current tech support. You have the right or people with the right, experience, knowledge and connections and you are in good shape. You don't and you can have problems. No mater what hardware you have.
Apple in the corporate environment? Heck yes, some of my customers, print shops, publication shops and engineering firms, are on majority or all Mac environments, but like any hardware you need to have look ahead and know what your support options are. One thing I do for my customers is document who to call to get real and useful help in case I can't be reached. Otherwise, Apple, Dell, Gateway whatever you can end up getting jerked around and really frustrated as you lose time and money. Knowing who to call in a company gets you those parts overnighted to your location and connected to a good tech. Yes, I am a Mac user. No I don't hate Bill Gates, he keeps me in business as a tech support guy. Vista? You see problems, I smell billable hours.
You might try contacting Apple Enterprise Sales at (877) 412-7753.
I would suggest any company looking into OS X solutions contact them. I believe they even have a separate support line you can reach.
In addition, as other have mentioned, look at Apple Authorized Service Providers who can provide more personalized service.
Also look at the Self-Servicing Account Program.
There are definitely resources out there for businesses to use. Going through the consumer support system obviously can be frustrating.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
As a disclaimer, I spent a large chunk of the 90's working for several large Apple Ressellers.
However, I think the basic problem here is one of approach, rather than Apple's response.
Let us put this in another way, altogether:
You run a small business, and you use HP/Compaq machines.
Who do you buy it from?
Most small businesses will probably go to either a large VAR (CDW, etc.) or find a local reseller of HP, who also provide support.
However, I suspect that it is safe to say that you probably aren't going to trundle down to Best Buy and purchase all of your hardware for you business from them.
When you purchase a computer (including support) from someone who understands the needs of the business community, your response to any problem will be significantly different than purchasing from a consumer-oriented store.
This is the same situation with Apple. Apple Stores (at least where I live) are in shopping malls. They are pandering to people who think that every computer should come with a free IPod, because that is their market.
However, again, at least where I live, there are at least two Apple resellers that specialize in business and know perfectly how to support a business customer.
At the time I was a tech, working for one of these companies, we supported every Fortune 1000 company in 40 miles who had a Mac in the office (which was most of them). When they called, we understood the difference between business support and everything else. When a marketing department for a Fortune 500 calls because their server died, it needs to be fixed now, not next week.
Not only that, but we were properly equipped and trained to support the business community. At the time I did this, I knew virtually everything there was to know about upgrades, patches, memory fixes, and hardware that Apple sold. Not only that, but I knew the same thing about every 3rd party product that my customers used. This included Quark, Adobe's full line, Macromedia, and hundreds of other programs, including business support software such as 3270 emulators and 3rd party software to connect Mac's (this was mid-90's) to Windows networks and servers, as well as mainframes.
The reality is that if you are purchasing your business hardware from a mall-store, you've made a serious error in the first place. Find a local reseller, preferably one who sells Mac's to businesses.
The other support issue is one of being able to determine software versus hardware errors. I can't tell you how many times some bizarre piece of shareware that some idiot long-haired birkenstock wearing graphic artist installed that caused problems with memory. A less savvy tech could very well have spent a day or two RMA'ing the memory to Apple, rather than knowing enough about the systems to properly diagnose.
In order to get business class support, you need to find a business class reseller. Relying on the home user support mechanisms won't buy you anything.
My advice: get out a phonebook and find a few Apple resellers nearby. Call them up and maybe meet with them. If you have a decent number of machines (which when I did this was usually about >2) and agree to buy through them, I'll bet money they will assist you with issues. The other place they will be able to assist is in working with Apple's AppleCare process. They do this every day. They know how to get through the system, and have done it countless times.
Bill
OK, I work in Disaster Recovery, so this hits home... First, the service plan is designed to fix your hardware only. If on site service is available from someone who is actually a trained, reliable, rep for a company (ie, you live/work in one of the 150 largest towns in America), then you are lucky and can usually get good service. Most people have to ship their hardware off or deal with some outsourced local company for repairs that take days. You hardly ever get your machine back in any good shape unless it's repaired at the factory, in which case they normally come back looking new or even better, but you have extended down time. Second, If you run a business, and downtime is critical, you have spare systems... 1 spare for every 20 functional machines of each specific model is a good rule of thumb. Image a copy of the machine to a clean box and restore the user's files. If you prepared, this means 30-60 minutes of downtime for the user. The repaired machine becomes your replacement spare. If your a growing company, you will have even more spare systems because you order in bulk for more staff than you currently have, and rotate new machines in as employees come online. If you're a really small business and only have a few machines you still need at least 1 spare at all times (even if you only have 1 working PC!). This is the cost of doing business vs the cost of downtime. Depending on the nature of your business, there are likely regulations from HIPPA, Baynes Oxley, or some other agency or legal requirement that you don't even know about. I've got a local doctor here in my town I service who is bound by law to have nearly 20K in systems and backups just to power his patient administration workstation for 1 simple secretary. It sounds rediculous, but it really isn't if he's going to be able to access those records anytime 24 hours a day if one of his patients is hospitalized and the hospital needs access to their history. I've also seen cases even with $20k servers where a part failure has kept a system down for 6-7 days as the tech orders and replaces a dozen parts trying to find out which one is causing the others to fail. Sure, he was on site with parts in 4 hours, but downtime can still be crippling regardless of the quality of your service contract. If you don't have a plan to be back up and running in 1 hour or less, then you just plan for downtime. Again, it's the cost of doing business. You need spare systems. Apple's repair policy is not a bad one. Sure they could focus more on large business and offer next day 2 way shipping or same day on site services for more money, but large businesses have spares, so what's the rush? This is one of the reasons Apple can provide such quality for the price, and that they made more profit last year than Dell while selling almost 20 times fewer machines.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
By this I mean, Apple doesn't deliver a general-purpose machine. Microsoft does. As much as I think Windows sucks, I have to admit, it sucks about the same for everything I could possibly want to do with it.
OS X, however, is absolutely awesome as long as I'm doing exactly what Apple wants me to do... and as soon as I step outside that, it could be awesome, and it could be worse than Windows. Simple example: Tried remapping the keybindings for Expose -- I like what F9 does on my Powerbook, but F9 is mapped to keyboard brightness controls, and fn-F9 is annoying -- anyway, mapped it to Command-Semicolon, which works great (especially on Dvorak), except that OS X cannot remember this key combination across reboots.
Sent a bug report. They sent me an email back saying that it was a known issue, and they were working on it -- and attached an NDA to that email. I hope I don't get sued for showing Slashdotters an Apple trade secret -- it's been almost a year since I reported that, and to my knowledge, they still haven't fixed a simple keymap problem.
I've run into all kinds of similar, strange little problems -- some even deliberate. Take QuickTime -- viewing a video fullscreen is a "pro" feature, which is why I used VLC almost exclusively on that machine. Then there's things like Software Update -- great for updating your Apple products, but won't update anything else, and there aren't any decent package managers.
Nothing was more illuminating than when it broke. The screen just went dead. Further experimentation suggests that the backlight is dead, and when the room illumination is just right, I can sort of see where a window is.
I know the machine still works, because aside from that window, and being able to SSH in, I have hooked it up (via DVI) to my desktop monitor, and that works. However, I cannot set the desktop as a primary monitor -- I can either "mirror" the laptop display, making a nice little 1440x900 display in the middle of my 1600x1200 monitor, or I can make it span (a dual-monitor setup), using the full resolution of my desktop, but having half my display (the laptop monitor) completely dead. It also makes reinstalls pretty useless, as I haven't been able to get the desktop monitor to work with any boot CD I've tried, including the OS X install DVDs.
And unfortunately, OS X knows exactly what resolution each monitor can handle. So no setting the mirrored display to 1600x1200 -- it won't go over what it knows the (dead) laptop monitor can handle.
Anyway, first thing I did was check my AppleCare account that I assumed I had. I put the serial number into the AppleCare website... and didn't have an account. Hmm, odd... So, next time I was in a city with an Apple store (I live in rural Iowa), I took it to a Genius bar... and discovered I really didn't have an account, and it'd cost me some $200 to even have it looked at. Apparently, AppleCare is designed to be sold as a separate product, but you must then register it to your Mac over the phone or internet.
Fair enough, but goddamned annoying. I dug up the AppleCare CD and used it to check my system for other problems while I got online and registered my Powerbook. Then I called Apple again, explained the problem, also mentioning a bad sector found by the AppleCare CD. They sent me a box -- next-day air or something, a beautifully-designed one-size-fits-any-Macbook box, with absolutely everything included. Tear off the address label and there's return postage there. Even nice little strips of tape inside the box, not to mention a piece of foam with perforations for every Macbook or Powerbook ever made -- tear it off on the right line and my Powerbook fit perfectly.
Apple is amazing when you're inside-the-box.
Mailed it off to them, and they called my cell phone a bit later and left me a voicemail, telling me they had determined it was "accidental damage", and not covered by my $240 AppleCare plan. I called them up and explained -- well, yes, I had dropped the machine a full year earlier, and that
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Not to play into the Mac baiting/idiolatry, but Apple does have some of the highest customer satisfaction numbers in the industry, year after year.
I'm sure there will be dozens of horror stories posted about here Macs & Apple, we can do the same for any brand. The truth is in numbers and again, Apple leads the industry in customer satisfaction and retention.
Your issue seems to be a mismatch between what you bought and the service you want.
You didn't buy a system with a business support contract. Apple does have those, but they're not in the Apple Stores. Instead like every other large vendor they have a division dedicated to business customers & their specific needs.
Instead you did the equivalent of going to BestBuy (albeit a much nicer looking one with staff far beyond any "Geek Squad" bufoonery) and are getting standard consumer service. Actually it's far better then you'd get from BestBuy et al, and if you sprang the extra $99 for AppleCare you'll get even better, but it's still walk-in service.
Your complaint really has nothing to do with Apple per se and instead with consumer customer service. Replace "Apple" with "HP" or "Gateway" and the store with "Best Buy", "CompUSA", "Microcenter", or whatever, and suddenly your complaint becomes much clearer
I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad experience with your Mac. I've friends who buy the kind of support you're looking for, where there is next-day service at their office for their Apple products. I've other friends who are certified in Mac repair, who give the kind of service you're looking for, show up, crack open your Mac, if they have the part handy replace it on the spot or if not retrieve it from a depot.
Instead you purchased we'll-look-at-it/fiddle-with-it/send-away-for-part s/send-the-machine-away-for-repair.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.