The Great Mac Fiasco

So I've been trying to get a Macbook on par with the used one I bought last year, which was AMAZING . First I got a new 13 inch. The screen was so yellow my Spyder thing couldn't calibrate it . Then another 13 inch- same thing. Got a used 15 inch and it was fine until I found out the GPU was failing and it needed a whole new logic board. Amazon A-Z claim /BBB/FTC fiasco aside I ordered a brand new 15 inch MBP with the 2.8 ghz gpu upgrade directly from Apple. It arrived from Shenzen last week and made it all of 3 hours before it told me I didn't have enough space to download a 2 kb file on an SSD with 320 gb of free space. A disk verification and a reboot later and it would only go into recovery mode and couldn't even find the disk to reinstall OSX on. Ok. Apple's going to send a new one.........

But the return with FedEx isn't getting scanned. More accurately it WASN'T getting scanned. Now it's disappeared from the FedEx system altogether. It was just sitting with "label created" but now it's not even showing up. I took the return MBP to FedEx, handed it to the guy and headed to work. That was early early yesterday morning. I know they have it. Apple says they'll start production on the replacement as soon as the broken one gets scanned in by FedEx. But..... where's the scan?! A this point I'm pretty much conditioned to assume the worst. Has anyone ever had a return just disappear before?

Are the computer gods telling me to give up and just get some blah blah windows machine?

Thanks guys. No receipt. the FedEx guy at the counter insisted that I didn't need a receipt- that the tracking number would be on the label I printed and I could use that as verification that it was dropped off. He was in the middle of chatting up a girl getting prints and I was in a mega hurry to get to work. Fun fact- the reason it wasn't showing up is that rather than taking you to the label you already created Apple's site actually generates a whole new label every time you click "print label" So the reason it wasn't showing up was that when I went back and checked the label it actually just gave me a completely different tracking number. The return apparently arrived just fine.

Anyway, Apple made it right- they let me pick a $100 gift of my choice from the Apple store and expedited a new custom build from Shanghai. They finished making it Wednesday and if not for a mechanical failure in Alaska it would have arrived Friday. Instead UPS delivered it Saturday morning.

Moral of the story: FedEx sucks, always get a receipt. UPS is pretty good at getting things delivered despite unforeseen problems and Apple will spend a lot of money to make sure you're happy.

They are. My phone had some problems in the fall and they had a new one on my doorstep 18 hours after I dropped the one I was having trouble with off at UPS.

Amazon used to be good- they really went over and above on a few issues but throughout 2014 they were just totally unresponsive and unwilling to help. Also, according to the rep responding to the BBB case the A-Z guarantee is extremely misleading. It says in the info on A-Z that you have 90 days to file a claim. It conveniently leads you past a buried page that says you have to request a return within 14 days to be eligible to receive benefits on an A-Z claim. It doesn't even cover the entire return period. Had I visited the BBB before buying a laptop on Amazon I would've seen their warning about a pattern of failing to honor A-Z claims.