Apple – Great Products, But Pray They Don’t Go Wrong…

SEE UPDATE BELOW…

As those of you that read Dr Gadget just may have picked up by now I’m something of an Apple fanboy. I switched to Mac November 2004 and since then we have had 3 iMac’s, an iBook, 2 white MacBooks and a MacBook Pro. This is not to mention the umpteen iPods, the three iPhones and the AppleTV. Our house is a veritable shrine to Apple. In addition I have been a keen evangelist for Apple and have converted many friends and family resulting in tens of thousands of dollars more sales.

Early in 2005 the logic board (Mac’s name for the motherboard) failed on my home iMac and it took a month to get repaired. Whilst this was a nuisance, I had an iBook for work and so it did not impact me there. Last year, however, as laptop performance converged with desktop I decided to consolidate on to one machine and for the first time invested heavily in a MacBook Pro. The machine cost nearly $5000 – and I took out the Applecare warranty for an additional sum in excess of $500 – to me a small fortune. My belief was that this is a business level machine and that the Applecare plan would ensure prompt service if I had any issues.

On Monday night my Mac died – refusing to boot at all. I was not unduly concerned having a Time Machine backup with all of my data for the last three months. Additionally we have some family friends who run an Apple Certified service business and who I knew would do their best to speed up any fix.

I was mortified today to receive a phone call from them to let me know that problem was again the logic board and that Apple were out of stock and would not be receiving new stock until the 10th of October. This meant that with the best will in the world I would not be getting back my machine until somewhere near the 15th… three more weeks of running the Aspen IT and web infrastructure with a Lenovo netbook – ouch.

Aghast I called Apple Customer Support and after being transferred around the world three times a very nice young man assured me he would try and speed things up and would call me back in a day or two. I do feel a bit sorry for these call centre folks – he copped a real tongue lashing from me. I put my case that when paying through the nose for a professional machine – and extra for the warranty – Apple had a responsibility to hold stock of spare parts. Do they anticipate that customer’s can keep a spare $5000 computer in case their main machine breaks down?

So I don’t know what will happen next. I have ordered a Dell laptop with better specifications that my Mac for about a quarter of the price. It even includes a free upgrade to Windows 7!! Perhaps the time has come to switch back?

UPDATE: Well I guess I had better stop complaining about Apple now.  I received a call from Apple Customer Service and they are replacing my Macbook Pro with a brand new machine.  They took on board my comments and accepted my position and did the right thing.  Way to go Apple!