Okay, now my write-up on the ordering experience, which was interesting.
I'm accredited with the Education Store, so I put together my config there. I got kicked to Unidays and back, everything was good. By mistake, I added AppleCare One instead of yearly AppleCare, which I caught before I completed the order. Because this was impossible to change, I deleted the "bag" (which is what Apple calls the shopping cart and not even everyone in Sales knows, see further below) and started over, this time with the yearly AppleCare (which is cheaper than adding it to my Apple One for this device).
Result on the website, closely paraphrased from the actual text, which I don't have: "Your order cannot be processed. One item is over the yearly limit. Please check our Sales Policy", which links to the Terms and Conditions. The Terms and Conditions say that it's allowed to order one (1) Mac mini per year using the Education Store rebate. I have bought my most recent previous Mac mini a lot longer ago than a year, not even close.
After two failed attempts, as a contingency and since I had to get ready to leave, I used the regular Apple Store site on the web. That order went through of course. Later, when I had more time, I called Apple to find out what the problem was and put in an Edu Store order, and if that would go through successfully, I would cancel the regular order.
What followed was a
3.5 hour long freak show with 8 different people, some of which making up weird theories, talking to themselves and others and none of them resolving the situation in a satisfactory way. Some invariants of the support experience are that the volume of their phone system is pretty low, and that large parts of the on-hold music are just white noise. This makes it feel cheap.
Of the eight conversations, 6 ended with "I've got [first name] from [department] on the line, who will help you with...". It went back and forth between customer support, sales and tech. The call was dropped when talking to person #6, and the last one ended in a (fulfilled) promise that I would get an email after they did further research.
Theories floated by different people were:
"You can only order from the Education Store once per year". Two people said that. My response was to ask to find anything in the Terms and Conditions or elsewhere that said that. Their response: After some further flailing, "I've got XYZ on the line..." and transferring me. (I had actually ordered something from the Education Store in the previous 365 days.)
"You can definitely order from the Education Store more than once per year". That came from the nicest and most helpful person, #8.
"The Mac mini with the M6 is too new to be preordered". Obviously BS, it can be preordered on that site.
"Your order of several items a few months ago was expensive, so it was a business order". Never heard of that. I don't have a business, and I don't have a business account with Apple.
Things I kept being asked to no avail:
Which email address did I use for the order? (No idea, I sign in using a passkey).
A million times I needed to
confirm my delivery address, phone number, etc. etc.
Please click on this thing so I can look at your order history. To no avail.
Advisor/Specialist or whatever #6 was the advisor/specialist from hell. Super aggressive, interrupted me, talke to me like and 8-year-old, got angry when I asked where on a web page a certain functionality was supposed to be, and so on. Unfortunately, there's no way to give feedback on that, because all I got was the usual feedback form, which has no provisions for several different advisors.
Person #8 was the best. The outcome of her relaying this situation internally was an email with the following contents:
Dear [Name],
We’re following up on your recent call to us.
We’ve determined that the quantity of items in your order does not exceed our maximum per customer.
You have 24 hours from the time this email was sent to place a new order at apple.com. You can also call us at 1-800-MY-APPLE at your convenience so that we can further assist you with your order.
I've looked at it, but it said the order would be delivered sometime in early-to-mid October, which wasn't worth it to me, given that my current order is going to be delivered on September 22.
--- Overall Assessment ---
What a lousy experience that was. (I still gave the last advisor a great review, because it wasn't her fault.) The people doing the phone service are by and large
- Clueless,
- Way too slow to decide they're not making progress and transfer cases,
- Unwilling or unable to escalate,
- Inventing their own bogus theories, and
- Downright aggressive in some cases.
I would have expected that at some point, after a lot of time had passed, they would have just escalated this to someone who could have just overridden the system and either forced the order through or modified my regular order to being an Education Store order.
The Apple online store is really great when things go smoothly. When they don't, it's amateur hour with guesswork, mumbling "Oh God" in the background and made-up theories.
