Your Experiences with Apple Support

Use the search function on this board and you will find a number of threads about Apple Support/Care. I love it. Apple has fixed every problem with in days. My quickest turnaround was slightly more than 2 days. My longest was 4. They replaced the LCD because it looked a little ragged, and they have fixed plastics (which aren’t covered) as a matter of customer service. The only thing that they did screw up on was they left a diagnostic disk in the CD drive once. It somehow scratched the LASER diode lens. They replaced it quickly. Apple Care has paid for its self time and time again. I have burnt through well over 10 laptops, and all of them had lots of technical problems. My iBook gets more use and has had fewer problems. I haven’t had problems with Apples tech people, but there are those that have had problems. If you do need to call technical support, be kind, understanding, and firm. If you are pissy, angry, and annoying I think that they might be less likely to go that extra mile for you.

Never had a hardware issue, but always great technical support.

Well, I've only had one experience with Apple support, but it was sufficiently miserable to make me recant my idea of becoming a "switcher".

The AC adaptor on my TiBook failed after 93 days (I'm being precise for a reason); and getting it replaced was a pain. It took two calls to technical support and my acceptance of their demand that I give them a credit card and agree to pay $49.95 for the call before they would even listen to my hardware issue. The $49.95 was because Apple's one-year warranty only provides 90 days of "free technical support"; after that, you either agree to pay $49.95 per incident or sign up for "AppleCare" ($349 on my machine).

Counting hold times, I spent an hour and a half on the phone getting them to replace the adapter, then waited four days for it to arrive. Since I couldn't use the machine for nearly a week, I went back to my Thinkpad.

Oh, and they reserved $180 against my credit card to make sure I returned the failed adapter and cord. Avoiding that charge will be a neat trick, since they sent no return instructions, RMA or anything. I used the boxes the replacement parts came in and shipped them back to the address on the packing list; I can only imagine what the odds are that Apple will connect all the dots and credit my account properly. And naturally, the shipping was at my expense.

This may not seem like a big deal to the Mac devotees on this forum, but when you're used to next-day repair/replacement and a prepaid, pre-addressed mailer for returning defective parts, it's a disappointment.