07/16/06 09:54 PM
Although I’ve always heard great things about Apple’s customer service, this was the fourth (yes, you read that correctly) weekend that my computer has been in for repair. When I first took my computer in, I was told it would take 3-5 days, but for the past 16 days the response for Apple has been that they’re “waiting on a part.”
Needless to say, in that span of time I’ve lost a lot of respect for Apple computers. Since I bought my Powerbook, I’ve been a big fan of it and even tried to fight the the various problems that started cropping up. When the problems (outlined below) became too much to ignore, I finally had to bite the bullet and get it repaired. So, as mentioned, here’s what went wrong with my laptop…
- About three months after purchase, one of the USB drives stopped working completely (which wasn’t a huge issue, since I used a 4-port hub on the other port).
- About four months after purchase, all of my desktop icons suddenly started re-arranging themselves every time I turned on the machine (yes, this was annoying, but since I worked through the finder I again overlooked it).
- About a month ago (nearly as long as Apple has had my computer in repair), the Superdrive stopped working. This was the final straw, as I could no longer burn CDRs, nor read from CDs (although I could still burn DVDRs oddly enough).
In the time that my computer has been AWOL, I’ve been forced back onto my crappy desktop machine (running Windows 95), and I’ve actually become accustomed to it at this point. It’s a little bit slower at everything I try to do, but I’ve had it for 8 years and still have never had a single problem with it, whereas my Apple laptop had 3 separate issues within 8 months of buying it. Compounding my frustration is the completely slow repair time by Apple, considering that if they have it for 3 more days, it will have been in their possession 1/12th of my first year of ownership.
Apparently my repair case has become somewhat of a local legend where I work, though, as a co-worker I don’t see very often asked me about it at a meeting recently, mentioning that they’d heard someone else talking about the repair time in disbelief. I guess that’s kinda funny.
Or something.
July 18th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Sometimes CD/DVD reader/writers have two laser heads; one for CDs and one for DVDs (they use different frequencies of light, though you can coax CDs to work with a DVD laser if you talk pretty to it). If all of your CD functionality is lost but DVDs still work, then this is probably the case and either the laser head itself or part of the drive mechanism for it went bork.
But in either case… that is internal to the superdrive, which is a modular hardware component inside the laptop and should be swappable. And its not like superdrive modules are rare… or expensive. Wow.
July 18th, 2006 at 11:56 am
I actually called Apple again yesterday and was prepared to chew someone out, but ended up wilting and not getting too upset at the guy on the phone. He did a bunch of tracking and told me the part they were waiting on (an optical head, which makes sense given what you just said) and put an expedited search or something on it.
Regardless, if I don’t have it back by Thursday, I’m going to call back again and it will be difficult to not get really, really pissed off. I want to like Apple, but they’re making it kind for me right now.