To All,
This is one of my only post on this board, I have been lurking and reading a lot of G5 ordering and delivery experiences. Here is my story.
I ordered a 2.5 G5, 1gig Ram, ATI 9600, 250 SATA, Bluetooth on Sept 5, 2004. It arrived today on Septh 27, 2005. I was very surprised to see my G5 ship so early after reading the stories on this board. My original ship date was from Apple was October 13th, so it was almost 3 weeks early. Now I know why.
My wife stayed home and worked Virtual Office today to receive shipment and inspect the box. The box was fine, no problems. I spent about 1.5 hours getting my work area all set up with the G5 and my 20" Aluminum Cinema display. Here is where it goes bad.....
I plug in the power expecting a beautiful sight, nothing...nada...no power. I open the case and check all the connections, check my UPS, check the power cable....plug it in, nothing. I can hear the power supplies click, but no power. By now I'm pretty concerned.
I call Apple Tech support and sit on hold for 35 minutes....by now I'm pretty steamed. I get a really nice lady on the line who takes my information and talks me thru the reset button on the motherboard. I close the case hoping for the best, plug in the power...hear the click of the power supplies...nothing.
It goes downhill from here. The Apple rep tells me I need to take it in for service. Uh, no way. I get a new G5 and it never even turns on and they want me to haul this 58 pound beast in for service. I ask to escalate to a manager, but its 9:01 and the managers get off at 9:00...so the rep tells me that she'll have to give me a ticket number and call them back to talk to management about my issue......I told her to please note in my ticket that the call tomorrow with their manager will not be fun.
During my call the Support rep finally fesses up that they are having huge production and performance issues with the G5 2.5 machines. No power, bad fans, bad running fans, bad CPU's, bad Motherboards....the list of these machines in for RMA is huge and they have a 4-6 week return time on machines with issues.
This saga will continue tomorrow morning, but I will be returning my G5 and getting my money back and sitting on the sidelines with Apple for a while. 3200$ for a machine that won't even power on out of the box is pretty poor and then to be told is has to be taken in for service when it never ran is even worse.
I am starting to wonder if they just didn't ship me a bad unit to get some of these orders cleared since they are still so backed up. I feel for the one's here who are waiting months for their unit, but I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to go thru what I went thru today. Apple clearly is selling a product that has a horrible QA process and a broken production line. I can only imagine what the new IMac G5 customers are gonna go thru.
Apple is a great company with great products if they could only make what they market. I'm one very disappointed customer.
I'll post my continuing saga tomorrow. Back to the reliable Titanium Powerbook and not spending my money with apple until 2005 or later........
Mike in NC
