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AppleCare Canada absolutely sucks!

I

iCeFuSiOn

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 18, 2007
511
0
Hey all,

I want to know how many of you live in Canada and have called AppleCare only to be told your only option is to take your computer into a repair center, or if you've been told other 'excuses' to try to get you off the phone. The reason I'm asking is because I recently had a very unpleasant experience with AppleCare in Canada where I was hung up on several times and passed around to different departments like a beach ball. Not very impressed with them.
 
Different Yet Same Outcome

iCeFuSiOn said:
Hey all,

I want to know how many of you live in Canada and have called AppleCare only to be told your only option is to take your computer into a repair center, or if you've been told other 'excuses' to try to get you off the phone. The reason I'm asking is because I recently had a very unpleasant experience with AppleCare in Canada where I was hung up on several times and passed around to different departments like a beach ball. Not very impressed with them.
Click to expand...

I have been having a lot of troubles with my iMac (24inch 2.8GHz 4 Gig Ram) ever since installing parallels, in 2 instances it blew out the partitions on my hard drive completely destroying all my data. Called apple care, and they walked through a solution the first time. A while later, I had the same issues when attempting to reinstall it. I called apple care, they gave me the same solution, but told me not to restore from time machine as the hard drive issue was a soft ware issue, and the problems would be resident on my back up copies as well. I tried to reformat the hard drive from my Leopard disk, and this too crashed. I called apple care back, and they told me to take it in to the apple store. The apple store installed a new hard drive (after 5 days in the store) and installed leopard without iLife, and then I was left with trying to get all my settings, 100K plus email messages, etc back onto the computer - a process that took about 3 days, that I'm told after the fact should have been done using time machine, and the information given to me was incorrect.

There seems to be a serious lack of training and understanding of the products by the staff at apple care here.

Good Luck to you.

BT
 
What sucks even more is there isn't an Apple Store here and the nearest authorized repair center is a 2 1/2 drive both ways plus I was told I'd need to leave the notebook there for two weeks. To top it off, the guy on the phone tried to sell me extended AppleCare for $399 AFTER they basically told me "well, sorry, but we can't do anything for you". Ugh.

The issues I'm having are AirPort connection dropping left, right, and center and kernel panics coming out of sleep or the screen not turning on at all, and it's not getting any better, just worse. Even after re-installing Mac OS X several times.
 
Your most logical option may be to send the machine in by courier or by post rather than drive 2.5 hours.

Remember, warranty service never covers your data, so make a backup before sending it in. An ideal situation would be to have an external drive you could make a Carbon Copy clone or Superduper bootable image of your hard drive to.
 
Good Experience Here

iCeFuSiOn said:
Hey all,

I want to know how many of you live in Canada and have called AppleCare only to be told your only option is to take your computer into a repair center, or if you've been told other 'excuses' to try to get you off the phone. The reason I'm asking is because I recently had a very unpleasant experience with AppleCare in Canada where I was hung up on several times and passed around to different departments like a beach ball. Not very impressed with them.
Click to expand...

I'm having (mostly) good experiences with Apple Care in Canada. I recently received from the online store a refurb cinema display. It was acting wonky, and I made several calls to Apple Care (they had me try a sequence of things, like resetting the PRAM, etc). I was also doing some online research here and on the discussions page at Apple, and self-diagnosed the problem (to be fair to AC its hard to pin down an intermittent hardware problem long-distance). I told them I probably needed a new power adapter for the monitor, and offered to direct them to the Apple discussions page that I had found. The support person put me on hold for a few minutes to talk to a senior technician, then came back and transferred me to a "product specialist" (different call centre) who agreed with me, and then arranged shipment of the power adapter. It arrived, I replaced it, monitor is now working great.

There are some cautionary notes, though.
1) They had to ship the power cable separately from the adapter, so they arrived on two different days. Luckily I didn't need the cable. The adapter was shipped from California to Vancouver (near where I live) and onto Montreal, before coming back to the West Coast. Don't you just love hub and spoke courier systems - and online tracking.
2) Apple wants the old power adapter back, or they are charging me for it. They provided a prepaid label for UPS, the only courier they can use in this case. UPS doesn't have a depot in the community I live in, and their best estimate of when they would pick up was between 8am and 8pm. I called Apple to warn them that it might take a while for UPS to get their part back to them since it was possible we were going to be playing "pick up tag" for awhile (I couldn't just leave it at the door, I had to sign the waybill). That I was willing to call UPS everyday for a pickup until we managed to be in the same place at the same time - can you imagine how much this could have cost UPS to send a truck and driver out to not pick up box? The best Apple could do was offer to reverse the charges on my credit card if we got to that point. Luckily we didn't get to that point, UPS picked up the package (a day late!) and all is good.

Long story, but it is on balance a positive experience.
 
I have not had good experiences with Apple Canada. If you think the phone operators are bad, don't go to the store in Toronto, Eaton Center. One genius is very rude and raised her voice when i ask if we can ask another genius for 2nd opinion. Majority of the sales people there act as if when they serve you..they are doing you a favor and you should be grateful. :eek:When I wanted to exchange my MBP because it had a problem..i was told if he new one has a problem too..they won't exchange it. Just refund -10% restocking fee and i should go get another brand of computer. Seriously? I love Apple and they ask me to go buy another brand?
:confused:
 
CanadaRAM said:
Your most logical option may be to send the machine in by courier or by post rather than drive 2.5 hours.

Remember, warranty service never covers your data, so make a backup before sending it in. An ideal situation would be to have an external drive you could make a Carbon Copy clone or Superduper bootable image of your hard drive to.
Click to expand...
As far as data I'm not concerened about it, I already have everything backed up. I was informed that there are no courier or mail-in services for Apple Canada, and that my only option was to drive it in.
 
If you have purchased Applecare for your computer here are some things you can do.

If you can't go to an Apple Store or and Apple Authorized repair center you can request Applecare to send you a box to have your computer shipped off to a repair depot OR you can request Applecare to send an authorized technician to your house to perform service on your computer. These services are free of charge however you must make it clear to Apple that you are ABSOLUTELY unable to bring your computer to either an Apple Store or Apple Authorized repair center.
 
f1 said:
If you have purchased Applecare for your computer here are some things you can do.

If you can't go to an Apple Store or and Apple Authorized repair center you can request Applecare to send you a box to have your computer shipped off to a repair depot OR you can request Applecare to send an authorized technician to your house to perform service on your computer. These services are free of charge however you must make it clear to Apple that you are ABSOLUTELY unable to bring your computer to either an Apple Store or Apple Authorized repair center.
Click to expand...
I've made it perfectly clear to AppleCare that there is absolutely no way that I can get the machine to an Apple Authorized Service Center to have the machine serviced and I was then told "well there are no other options for you, we do not provide mail-in service in Canada."
 
so, being a canadian without applecare (im waiting a year to get it...) if something goes bad, and i need to send it in for servicing, assuming i dont live near an apple service center, they will refuse to help me?
 
You should be able to ship your computer out for repair in Canada, i've done it before when i used to live out in the boonies.
 
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