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Anyone else seeing slow repairs?

Goldfire

Goldfire

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 29, 2009
141
115
Oklahoma City
In 10 years I've only ever had to take one of my MBPs in for repair once. That was a few years ago and I had it back in perfect order 2-3 days later. Two weeks ago I brought in my 2018 MBP with the Vega 20 that seemed to have a defective logic board as far as I could tell. They told me it would take 2-3 days to get the computer back after sending it off for repair.

Here we are 2 weeks alter and it is still sitting in the "diagnosing" phase and they can't give me an estimate as to how much longer it is going to take. I run my entire business off of this computer and getting rather annoyed at having spent well over $4k on a new computer that I can't use. Is this an isolated event or have others been experiencing the same?
 
Goldfire said:
Why should I have to give them a free $5k loan for a few weeks when they should be able to do the repair in just a few days?
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Give them a free loan? I'd assume you'd put it on a charge card where you're paying nothing for the loaner (while getting protections against loss or damage so you're not shouldering any risk). When you return it you're handing Apple a bill since they'd have to pay to clean, refurbish, and then sell (at a discount) the machine. Seems like a reasonable way to express to them the annoyance of slow repair times...

But complaining here without a machine (for business) is better I guess.
 
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I used to have to wait up to a week for a repair from my local store. Then they hired repair people and they can usually turn stuff around overnight now.
 
Depends what the stores backlog is, I imagine they had a lot of keyboards to replace

Mine went into repair yesterday, they said 3-5 days but they don’t have a huge backlog.
 
LogicalApex said:
Give them a free loan? I'd assume you'd put it on a charge card where you're paying nothing for the loaner (while getting protections against loss or damage so you're not shouldering any risk). When you return it you're handing Apple a bill since they'd have to pay to clean, refurbish, and then sell (at a discount) the machine. Seems like a reasonable way to express to them the annoyance of slow repair times...

But complaining here without a machine (for business) is better I guess.
Click to expand...

I was asking if others were having similar experiences. Needing to buy another computer and go through even more hassle isn't an appropriate resolution and not something Apple should want their customers going through. I guess you just like being an ass to random people on the internet. To each his own.
 
Goldfire said:
Here we are 2 weeks alter and it is still sitting in the "diagnosing" phase and they can't give me an estimate as to how much longer it is going to take.
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You don't have to accept unreasonably long repair times. Tell them to finish the repair very soon, or you will withdraw from the purchase contract and request your money back.
 
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Most people seem to be getting repairs done in a week or so. The local stores do fewer repairs locally. Instead, they send out machines to repair depots which have the systems needed to diagnosis issues and this introduces delays for shipping and sitting in a queue at the repair depot. If your problem was a transient that takes some work to replicate this will also slow the repair cycle.
 
I took mine for a keyboard repair on Saturday and it was back on Wednesday with a new logic board, keyboard, touchbar, two new fans.
 
There was one guy on here who sent their computer to Apple for repair with keyboard and T2 issues and Apple had it for like 4-5 weeks and sent it back without a repair because they could not duplicate the issues in depot. That may be part of the delay. Of course, they should communicate that to you if that is the case, but they didn't to him. He had to keep calling them.

Eventually, they finally did replace his machine. I haven't seen him in the forums lately, so hopefully they solved his issues and he is happily using his replacement unit.
 
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OP wrote:
"Is this an isolated event or have others been experiencing the same?"

I will take a guess, that in the case of recent MacBook Pros (2016, 2017, 2018), there have been so many failures that Apple has become "swamped" with too many repairs and not enough spare parts.

I wonder if they will learn anything from this?
 
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Fishrrman said:
OP wrote:
"Is this an isolated event or have others been experiencing the same?"

I will take a guess, that in the case of recent MacBook Pros (2016, 2017, 2018), there have been so many failures that Apple has become "swamped" with too many repairs and not enough spare parts.

I wonder if they will learn anything from this?
Click to expand...

I remember this happening with the 2007-2008 nVidia Discrete Graphics failures. But they got nVidia to pay for those repairs. It wasn't just Apple. HP and Dell had the same problems.
 
Goldfire said:
I was asking if others were having similar experiences. Needing to buy another computer and go through even more hassle isn't an appropriate resolution and not something Apple should want their customers going through. I guess you just like being an ass to random people on the internet. To each his own.
Click to expand...


His point is valid. Yours is too.

It's a farce that you have to wait so long, but I would do exactly what he suggests. Buy another, restore, then return it. Yeah it's a PITA, agreed.
 
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Howard2k said:
His point is valid. Yours is too.

It's a farce that you have to wait so long, but I would do exactly what he suggests. Buy another, restore, then return it. Yeah it's a PITA, agreed.
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Personally I bought another product that isn't inherently flawed. Apple's only metric is $$$$ cut that off and they will rapidly change be assured of that...

Q-6
 
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Queen6 said:
Personally I bought another product that isn't inherently flawed. Apple's only metric is $$$$ cut that off and they will rapidly change be assured of that...

Q-6
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Yeah you could do that for sure, but that doesn't work in this instance. A short term replacement of a macOS device with a Windows device is impractical for the vast majority.

Long term - totally agree.
 
Keyboard swap for 2016+ rMBPs is not a trivial repair, you have to disassemble virtually the entire machine, and on top of that Apple switched to using tons of tiny little screws that you have to replacing using tools that are metered to only apply the exact amount of force needed to tighten them. As I have said before, the repairs are not super complex, just time consuming.
 
Howard2k said:
Yeah you could do that for sure, but that doesn't work in this instance. A short term replacement of a macOS device with a Windows device is impractical for the vast majority.

Long term - totally agree.
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No choice as need to turn coin and Apple is notoriously arrogant, 3 years on the keyboard remains to be an unreliable mess. Anyway Apple's not remotely interested in the Mac these days, beyond the negative tech press impacting it's image hence the piss poor line up.

TBH I wish Apple would spin off the Mac as a separate company run by people who have a real passion for the platform. Sadly we all know that Apple will just milk the Mac dry and dump it at the first convenient opportunity...

Q-6
 
Goldfire said:
In 10 years I've only ever had to take one of my MBPs in for repair once. That was a few years ago and I had it back in perfect order 2-3 days later. Two weeks ago I brought in my 2018 MBP with the Vega 20 that seemed to have a defective logic board as far as I could tell. They told me it would take 2-3 days to get the computer back after sending it off for repair.

Here we are 2 weeks alter and it is still sitting in the "diagnosing" phase and they can't give me an estimate as to how much longer it is going to take. I run my entire business off of this computer and getting rather annoyed at having spent well over $4k on a new computer that I can't use. Is this an isolated event or have others been experiencing the same?
Click to expand...

What was your computer doing that was problematic?
 
gigapocket1 said:
What was your computer doing that was problematic?
Click to expand...

It would randomly freeze constantly (sometimes up to 7 or 8 times per day). Everything on the screen would be frozen other than the mouse and audio would continue to play, requiring a force shutdown and restart.
 
Keyboard repair been a week now, but I’ve been told that they had to replace the logic board, for some reason.
 
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