Eh, sales are worthless without service
At the university where I work, my department has taken a thorough deep dicking from Apple recently. We are not happy customers at the moment.
I manage a lab with a dozen 1 GHz eMacs, and we have been having trouble with the machines just dying. Three months out of the box, and 2 of the 12 will not boot, one of those two is kaput for the second time in six weeks. The problem is with the backup batteries going dead, and we have already had one replaced a few weeks ago.
I'd fix it myself if it were not such a huge pain in the butt to get a tiny purchase order through the university red tape to buy batteries. And then, would such a self-repair void the warranty? I have not read the fine print, but I bet it would.
So, when the two machines went down with what was obviously the same manufacturing problem, I called Apple to get warranty service on the units. Figured it would take 15 minutes or so on the phone, just like last time we had this problem. Silly me.
I was on the phone an hour and ten minutes, half of it on hold, half of it trying to explain the simple problem to some nimrod named "Steve" (certainly not Steve Jobs!), who eventually transfers me to a "Product Specialist", who asks me the same ^%$# questions "Steve" did.
Guess what? He agreed that I had diagnosed the problem correctly. At this point I had been on the phone for 70 minutes. He says he will set up on-site service for us, that I will get a call from the certified on-campus technician who served us last time, and finally the phone call is over. I am finally free to go 45 minutes late to a seminar I wanted to attend.
Five minutes later my phone rings, "Wow," I thought, "that was fast." Silly me. It was some other doofus from Apple calling to say that we cannot be serviced on-site because we do not have AppleCare, and that we have to yank these two computers from the lab, drive them across town to an authorized repair center that I know is crappy from past experience, and then wait a week or two while they get around to doing a 30-minute job before going back to pick up the machines.
Never mind that these machines have been out of the box since only mid-August, never mind that the office of the repair tech is right across the friggin' street, never mind that it is clearly a recurring defect, either in battery drain or a bad batch of batteries.
So, before we Mac fans get all excited about Apple picking up more education market share (which I would love to see, as I sit here typing on my new Powerbook), let's see support and service for educational customers be something that is not total garbage.
If Apple is serious about remaining strong in the educational market, they will bend over backwards to ease the BS for us in dealing with their "Support" wing. As with any institution, we already have a ton of manure and idiots to wade through locally whenever we need to get something done: forms, lazy office staff, purchase orders, senseless management, multi-layer approvals, and so on. I don't need BS and static from Cupertino as well.
Else, next time around, no one will want to buy Apple because of the service headaches. And none of us want that.
