apple

I have a Mac­book Pro 15” 2.2GHz which was pur­chased in 2007. I pur­chased Apple­Care with it locally as the com­pany I work for has an arrange­ment which allows them to pur­chase Apple­Care locally. Doing a war­ranty check against my ser­ial num­ber on the Apple web­site con­firmed that the war­ranty expires in 2010. The machine started giv­ing me graph­ics related issues, but they weren’t con­sis­tent so I didn’t take it in for a few days while I tried to find out what the prob­lem was, if any. I ended up run­ning Apple diag­nos­tics and unfor­tu­nately my sus­pi­cions were con­firmed as I was told that I do indeed have a graph­ics card issue. I then found out that this is a com­mon prob­lem with Mac­book Pros that have NVIDIA graph­ics cards like my one and that Apple extend the stan­dard one year war­ranty to two years for this fault. Given all of that I felt that it was safe to assume that this was a fairly com­mon prob­lem that Core must surely see pretty fre­quently, and that it couldn’t be too hard to diag­nose see­ing as even I was able to diag­nose it, and that given how com­mon the prob­lem was, Core would be silly to not keep stock of the replace­ment parts.

I was going to take the machine to the Core tech­ni­cal cen­ter in Jet Park, so I went to the Core web­site to find the address. Mmm, con­fus­ing. The web­site still said that Core were in Kramerview. Con­fused and not want­ing to go all the way to a loca­tion in Jet Park that I had yet to con­firm the address of, I tried phon­ing them. Not ONE of the num­bers on their con­tact page worked!!!!! I asked a friend who used to work for Core if she could find out for sure whether I was able to take the machine in to an iStore, and she said I could, so I took it to Clear­wa­ter and booked it in all offi­cially etc. A few days later I phoned all the num­bers I could find for the tech­ni­cal cen­ter to see how far they were to solv­ing my prob­lem, and was told that the machine wasn’t even booked in yet, despite the iStore hav­ing said that they have a daily courier ser­vice between all iStores and the tech­ni­cal cen­ter. I then began many frus­trat­ing days of try­ing to get through to Core and sim­ply not suc­ceed­ing. I was given an email address for a sup­posed “Nuno” who I wrote an email to, only to have it bounce as he doesn’t really exist. I had a secu­rity guard answer a phone after ten min­utes on hold only to tell me that I must phone back in ten min­utes because nobody was there and that he was just a secu­rity guard and I must not get cross with him. Not there?? In the mid­dle of the day?

I’m sure you can appre­ci­ate how I was feel­ing about Core (and Apple in gen­eral) at this stage. Pretty damn furi­ous. And that aside, if you have a Mac or a job then you will appre­ci­ate either how much I was hat­ing not hav­ing a Mac, or how much my work was being neg­a­tively affected by not hav­ing a proper machine to work on.

I finally man­aged to get hold of Core and was told me that a quote had been sent to the iStore many days ago. Thanks iStore, don’t bother phon­ing me or any­thing. I’m sure my sen­sors will just fig­ure this one out for them­selves. I told them that being sent a quote was crap and that they didn’t need a proof of pur­chase when they were being told quite clearly by Apples own web­site that the machine is under war­ranty until 2010. I was told they would let the tech­ni­cian know. I wasn’t told that this was code for “thanks a lot sir now you can begin another four week wait dur­ing which you have no idea what’s hap­pen­ing as you can’t get hold of us.”. But that’s what happened.

Tick, tock.

When you reach this point you become stuck as to what, if any­thing, you can do about it. I thought about Hello Peter’ing them but decided that this wasn’t going to make any dif­fer­ence with a com­pany that clearly gives rocks for whether they have unhappy clients or are pro­vid­ing an even vaguely decent ser­vice. Besides, enough peo­ple had already com­plained there, and they were mostly all still unhappy. Stuck as to what my plan was, I dreamed up dif­fer­ent ways for them to die, and made some of these pub­lic (on every social net­work that I’m on thanks to ping.fm).

And what an excel­lent plan that was, as I was imme­di­ately given the atten­tion of the first of two of the only one decent peo­ple to work at Core. In an email I told him: “I don’t have the energy or time to baby such a large col­lec­tion of incom­pe­tent peo­ple, so who knows how long this is going to take if you or some­body else there isn’t able to help. As much as I love my Mac, and you must under­stand… I really really love it, this kind of sit­u­a­tion is going to play a large part in decid­ing whether or not I spend another R30 000 in a few years when it’s time for my next machine. It’s _really_ bad ser­vice!!!!”. This was only sent to him at around mid­day, and yet that very same day he had man­aged to track down on their side what the story was, make a deci­sion on whether they could help me or not, and what help they’d give me, get the sec­ond decent per­son who works there to fix the thing and have him phone me to find out whether I wanted a cer­tain par­ti­tion on that machine and finally to have him rein­stall Leop­ard on my machine. Very impres­sive! My prob­lem was imme­di­ately solved. It took another three or four days for the machine to return to the iStore, but I was happy to be able to fetch it on Fri­day after work, despite the time being 20h00… yes, 8 o’clock in the evening.

After all of that I hadn’t wanted to spend any more of my life wast­ing time with Core, as I just did by writ­ing this post, but if it’s going to help make up the mind of a poten­tial pur­chaser of a Mac who doesn’t really have R30 000 to spend on a lap­top but has been told really good things about Macs, then I guess it wasn’t that much of a waste of time.