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?"

You should try

[Nick Fury]

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.

More details?

[Zaurus]

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.

"Pro Care"

[isaac]

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

Re:AppleCare is great...

[tsnee]

Usually better than when you dropped it off

Depends on which Apple Store. The one in Durham, NC always returned my laptop in worse condition. I would sit in the store for six hours to tell someone my DVD drive was broken, wait three or four weeks to get my computer back, then find that its wireless networking no longer worked. Take it back, wait a few weeks, find that the sound no longer worked. The last time I bothered to take it in, they didn't even put all the screws back in the case! After six months of this, my extended warranty finally expired, and now I am no longer a customer.

Not a good experience for me either

[huguley]

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.

Lack of spare parts

[klubar]

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.

Re:Macs for business use are still silly

[iluvcapra]

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.

Sigh. My G5 under my desk has all of the sound effects for a certain arachnid-Stan Lee-related movie on it. If it dies and it can't get fixed, my dubbing stage will stop working within about an hour or two, and the dubbing stage is booked for around $1000/hour. "Fancy Design businesses" like advertising, commercial art and film production, have hideously short turnarounds and are ruinously expensive on a minutes and hours basis.

AppleCare ain't great, good for home, but bad for what I do professionally. So how do we do it? Our tech support people take Macs seriously, they have a small inventory of spares for when they need to send one back, and they know enough to fix small things themselves. I've never needed mine replaced for anything, FWIW. Any large organization could handle supporting Macs, having IT people who take them seriously and keep up to date on their issues is the real problem.

Oh and having a spare machines on site helps too ;)

Re:AppleCare is great...

[linuxpng]

AMEN! I had a powermac I dropped off at that same store that was suffering from the sudden shutdown issue you'll find on some mac boards. (replacement systemboard + powersupply)I came back after 3 weeks to find it had looked like it had been dragged across a circuit board (you know that sharp soldier joints on the back) and for them to tell me "it couldn't possibly have happened in repair".

Just the last straw. I've had a powerbook (my first mac the old Ti) die right out of the box that kept going back to service for 6 months because when they fixed something, they broke something else. They eventually replaced it with the next level Ti powerbook that had the paint flaking issue. That powermac also had it's powersupply replaced once because they use cheap fans and they used to get loud after a perioud of time. Also still have a 12inch powerbook that had 3 hard drive replacements and has a slight wobble. You should look at their forums for the replacement batteries they sent out on the recall.. See how many people got batteries that don't even fit(mine too).

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID= 636886&tstart=0 [apple.com]

The problem is when a product is old Apple wants to forget the ever made it. Oh sure when there is a class action lawsuit.

Sorry for the rant, I've given apple waaay too much money.