Poor Customer Service from Apple Care

Written by Adam

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I’m a bit annoyed with Apple Care. My MacBook has been suffering from hairline cracks, a bad hard drive, and a broken LED on the AC adapter. Recently, something went wrong with the MacBook and now my perfectly working battery doesn’t power my MacBook. (Works fine in other MacBooks and other batteries do not work in mine.) This is the point where I decided I couldn’t continue with all these problems and decided to let Apple know I needed help.

I’ve been having considerable problems with my MacBook and with my background and expertise had a very high confidence that if I returned this to Apple for repairs, it would continue having problems soon after getting it back. I’ve had pretty good experiences with other Macs I’ve owned and just figured I may have gotten one of those Macs that were bad right out of the factory. My hope was to convince Apple to just exchange this for a new one.

After ninety minutes on the phone with Apple, I was given an unsatisfactory resolution along with an array of incorrect technical conclusions about my MacBook. I was told the battery was bad and I was told the hard drive was probably fine. Additionally, I was given the wrong information regarding policy, the process for getting my Mac repaired, and the time frame for those repairs. First I was told that the separate issues would have to be handled as different cases. That was later corrected and I was told they could all be repaired at once. The supervisor I spoke with jumped back and forth between having and not having the authority to exchange my current MacBook for a new one. Eventually he told me I should speak with customer service the following morning.

He also told me the policy for exchanging for a new MacBook is that my MacBook would have had to have been sent back to Apple Care at least three times for repairs first. I had only sent it back for repairs once before. It seems that if I had just sent my MacBook in when I was originally experiencing each individual issue instead of trying to live with them, I would have sent it back two additional times already and I would have had the AC adapter replaced. That would have, of course, totaled three times being sent to Apple for repairs. Unfortunately, that line of reasoning wasn’t accepted by this individual.

After getting off the phone with Apple Care, they had still left me with saying my battery may just be bad and they wouldn’t replace it. I happened to be going to have dinner with two friends that evening and I just happened to arrive early and it just happened to be near an Apple Store and they just happened to have an opening for me to meet with a “Genius” within ten minutes of arriving. This individual told me that it was not a problem with my battery just by my description and verified it by swapping batteries with another MacBook. He also gave me a different time frame for how long Apple Care will typically take with repairs. He said it was seven to ten days as opposed to three to four.

Ultimately, I’m very unhappy with this customer service experience I’ve had with Apple. I was given incorrect information, I was on the phone troubleshooting for way too long, I was on the phone on hold for way too long, and I’ll likely have a week of downtime if I send my Mac in for repairs. And of course, I have high confidence that I’ll have continued issues with this Mac in the future. At this point, I’m strongly considering purchasing a Dell laptop loaded with Ubuntu and selling my MacBook after it’s repaired.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Opinion, Information Technology, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Poor Customer Service from Apple Care”

  1. Bas Says:
    November 25th, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    I agree Apple Care service spends more time identifying you than the time they actually spend opening their ears and listening. But for a very few brighter ones, most of their reps are quick to give stock answers and canned e-mails, most of which indicate they haven’t understood ea word of what you just got through telling/writing/chatting them. The last “genius” I had on the phone was teling me to reformat and recover my system - all to cure a problem with a misplaced Applications folder, which somehow ended up in the Home folder instead of the root hard drive. Moving things around carefully and rebooting cured the problem. I know more than those turkeys in Bombay most of the time; which isn’t saying much, I’ll tell you. And for this kind of AppleCare help they charge $169 American! I get better help from HP folks in Costa Rica - hard to believe!

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