Customer Service. In my 43 years in the computer industry and 25 years in the PC world, no company has the wonderful customer service that Apple has. I've owned or dealt with Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, IBM, COMPAQ and mostly, their customer service sucks, My last high end Dell, out of the box, had problems reading CDs and DVDs (2 different drives, had to open and close seveal times to get them to work). Tried deleting the drivers and re-installing to no avail. I had the 3 year service contract with 1st year 24 hour in home. Dell said I could ship it back to them, DUH! What happened to the 24 hour in home service? Not. BTW, Dell's service is known for being less than satisfactory unless you work for a company with 1,000's of PCs and a service agreement. I was helping a friend fix her Gateway desktop and ended up calling Gateway. The PC came with 256Megs of RAM and XP Pro and Office 2003 (an older PC still under warranty at the time). After explaining the problem, the customer service rep told me the PC did not have enough memory fo XP, WRONG ANSWER. I told her thats what the PC came with and my Gateway laptop came configured the same way and she hung up on me. Called back to a different rep and he told me she never logged the call (company policy). Ended up doing a destructive restore. Have you noticed that seveal companies only allow you to chat online and don't give a phone number? Thats because they cannot speak english well enough for you to understand! When I have had to contact Apple, at the store or customer care, they spoke in understandable ENGLISH and they are always polite! Wow, what a concept. Even if I have to pay a little more I will gladly pay it for the service. Don't have to ship a PC to Dell, HP, etc. I can take it to one of two Apple stores within 20 minutes of my house. I realize I'm lucky to have the stores so close. BTW, I work for a company that has over 70,000 PCs and over 3,000 servers. Our mega service contract still sometimes sucks.
