Some of you may know that I have a livejournal, mainly from a discussion a few weeks back, and due to this I keep track of some of my friends online. One of my friends had this to say about his iBook that he got last August......
Several things strike me as funny. Other then the fact that my friend has a tendency to over exaggerate things but still I've seen his iBook flip out so it's not his imagination. The first being that if Apple has such high quality products why do they give users such a run around to get something repaired? It's not like the end user is trying to scam them for a new motherboard or something. They just want to get their system fixed.
I'm going to be honest. Crap like this scares me. I've gone through 3 laptops in my time. Compaq, Dell (still have), and now Toshiba, and for the most part they have all been reliable and when I have had problems I've NEVER been given the run around.
Can someone. ANYONE tell me cases like this are extremely rare because secondly:
Disgruntled Apple users get vocal
That there are actual petitions online and that there have been people who have had their hardware repaired multiple times makes me wonder just how committed Apple is to customer service esp when you consider:
applecare marketing
Yet Another iBook Tragedy
Is Apple's 'Book Quality Slipping?
Finally I have to ask the question on the quality between the iBooks and the PowerBooks. Obviously you are getting more specs when you purchase a PowerBook but what about the quality and build? Are PowerBooks more solid? A better quality?
Maybe its just me but this behavior smacks of a company trying to save a buck, or two, or one-hundred, or two-hundred at the sacrifice of their customers.
Now I know the first thing a person is going to tell me. That all OEM's have this problem. But everyone keeps telling me Apple=quality. Then where the heck is it!?!? If Dells are POS and Apple is blissful computing heaven then why do I have 2 friends who have had major headaches with their systems!?!? (Both iBooks.)
I want to be convinced that this kinda crap is few and far between or if nothing else if I spend $3,000 on a laptop I'm going to get what I pay for and that is quality. I'm sorry if I come off pissy but I've spent the last 6 months hyping myself up over getting a PowerBook sometime this summer/fall (Depending on when they come out with a G5 PowerBook.) and suddenly I read my friends rant and start doing some digging and find many a pissed off Mac user. It's more then a little disheartening and nerve racking to think I could get a lemon and Apple could, for all intents and purposes, tell me to piss off.
Anyone have any insight into this? I'm I being over paranoid? IS it not as bad as some make it out to be?
Thanks.
Well, guess what? I couldn't reproduce the problem to "prove" it to the Apple store. Sure, they believed I wouldn't waste my time going down there in order to waste their time to lie about my iBook having a problem just so I could be without it for another week, but they won't service it unless they can see the problem for themselves. I turned it on, put it to sleep, opened it up, several times, restarted it, turned it off, nothing brought the problem back. The guy I talked to rapped on the iBook sharply with his fingers, saying the symptoms I described sounded like the dreaded "logic board" failure of iBooks frequent, but that his actions should make the notebook "go crazy" and it just sat there mocking me. He picked it up and shook it around, took the keyboard off and poked around, and told me that it was probably just a pinched cable that went back into place.
Well, that's just great. I wasted 45 minutes and gas to drive to Southdale to be told they can't do anything about it unless I can show it to them. I hate this machine. It worked fine for the first four months until this past month and a half. I wish I'd never bought it. It will be the last portable from Apple I ever buy (not including super old collectable machines like the pack rat I am), and it may be the last new machine I buy from Apple, period. I don't know how I'd handle switching to another OS but I'm tired of this bull****.
My short term plan is to see if this happens again. If it doesn't, I'll count my blessings. In the meantime, I'm buying a hard drive caddy and a wireless PC card for my Thinkpad so I have another wireless notebook either for when this one craps out, and/or I finally get fed up and get rid of it (I would have done that long ago if I could get more than $900 for it, when I paid $1500 in August).
One thing this runaround has taught me, besides Apple having ****ty tech support (Your mileage may vary, but after what I've been through that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it), is that I don't treat my iBook like it's made of glass anymore. The first one I had never left the house. I was so terrified of it getting damaged. And the HD still ended up having bad sectors and reading problems, the video board had flaws (much like this one but worse), and it developed stuck pixels after a couple years. I don't angst quite as much about bringing this machine out and about, work, school, friends places, partly because it's about three pounds lighter than my first iBook, and partly because I no longer hold it in such high regard as I once did. It's not the wonderful, beautiful, flawless pinnacle of technology I thought it was. It's flawed, it's been a pain in the ass recently and overall my positive experience with it pales in comparison to the frustration and aggravation it's caused me. I wish I'd never bought it. I wish it were worth selling. But I'm stuck with it.
Several things strike me as funny. Other then the fact that my friend has a tendency to over exaggerate things but still I've seen his iBook flip out so it's not his imagination. The first being that if Apple has such high quality products why do they give users such a run around to get something repaired? It's not like the end user is trying to scam them for a new motherboard or something. They just want to get their system fixed.
I'm going to be honest. Crap like this scares me. I've gone through 3 laptops in my time. Compaq, Dell (still have), and now Toshiba, and for the most part they have all been reliable and when I have had problems I've NEVER been given the run around.
Can someone. ANYONE tell me cases like this are extremely rare because secondly:
Disgruntled Apple users get vocal
That there are actual petitions online and that there have been people who have had their hardware repaired multiple times makes me wonder just how committed Apple is to customer service esp when you consider:
applecare marketing
Yet Another iBook Tragedy
Is Apple's 'Book Quality Slipping?
Finally I have to ask the question on the quality between the iBooks and the PowerBooks. Obviously you are getting more specs when you purchase a PowerBook but what about the quality and build? Are PowerBooks more solid? A better quality?
Maybe its just me but this behavior smacks of a company trying to save a buck, or two, or one-hundred, or two-hundred at the sacrifice of their customers.
Now I know the first thing a person is going to tell me. That all OEM's have this problem. But everyone keeps telling me Apple=quality. Then where the heck is it!?!? If Dells are POS and Apple is blissful computing heaven then why do I have 2 friends who have had major headaches with their systems!?!? (Both iBooks.)
I want to be convinced that this kinda crap is few and far between or if nothing else if I spend $3,000 on a laptop I'm going to get what I pay for and that is quality. I'm sorry if I come off pissy but I've spent the last 6 months hyping myself up over getting a PowerBook sometime this summer/fall (Depending on when they come out with a G5 PowerBook.) and suddenly I read my friends rant and start doing some digging and find many a pissed off Mac user. It's more then a little disheartening and nerve racking to think I could get a lemon and Apple could, for all intents and purposes, tell me to piss off.
Anyone have any insight into this? I'm I being over paranoid? IS it not as bad as some make it out to be?
Thanks.