The most lucrative support organization....
First-time poster...bare with me...
I'm sure this has been up for discussion a zillion times...anything less would baffle me. Excuse me for not searching earlier threads but I need to get this out of my system...now!
So, me and my wife (both students at the moment) have been working our a$$es off during the summer break and finally we're going to have a short vacation (with lots of study preparations) before the new semester begins. Or maybe I should say we had planned to get a couple of days out of town....until Apple Support entered the picture.
The thing is, my wifes MacBook Pro has had problems with the USB ports (and a couple/bunch of dead pixels...but let's leave them out of the picture for the time being) for a while and finally she figured it would be a good time to fix the problem before the warranty expires and the new semester begins. Her problem is that mice that are connected to the USB ports enters some kind of 'sleeping mode' after only a couple of seconds when not moved. Then it takes lots of movement and plenty of time (5-10 seconds...which is an eternity when working with graphic design) before the mouse reacts again. The little red light on the optical mouse is lit all the time as far as I've seen, but the laser lights up only when the mouse is back online.
Anyhoo....she gets on the phone with Apple Support who tells her that if the problem is software related she's going to have to pay for it. Fair enough...though she has not messed with weird USB-settings related to hibernation modes. She couldn't possibly find her way to that kind of setting (or any other deep tech setting) even if someone pointed a watercannon at her. Not that she's tech incompetent...she's just not interested in messing. I'm the one doing the messing...and usually I can find my way out of it. So they go about doing all and everything to make sure the problem was not software related. When she's tried all their little neat tricks they finally figure it definitely seems to be a hardware failure or malfunction. But as a last resort they ask her to backup her files and then archive and reinstall OSX with the original discs she got from Apple...just in case something goes wrong during the installation...though they never have encountered a problem or failure with a reinstall. At this point she has spent at least 3 hours on the phone with various support people. Low and behold, after the archive/reinstall the cute little bugger won't start. All it says is "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. The target does not have enough space."
So once again on the phone with Apple Support they start sending her around to different people that hopefully can get her back on track.... But now there is noone that can help her. The person she finally ends up with says that she must see a service tech and pay for it. Wait a minute...you were the ones who to begin with thought it was a software problem. Then you slowly accepted it was a hardware malfunction after meticulous and thorough digging. As a final resort, with my wife hesitating, YOU INSISTED that a reinstall had a slim microscopic chance, need I say not probably, of fixing the issue. Then this forced reinstall messes up the computer so that it's unusable. It doesn't start! It hangs! There's no way past that little box with the neat option 'Close'. Close, close, close, close....but it won't close. Now Apple Support want her to pay them to fix the problem they caused. Not only is she completely bullied by them, her computer is actually completely unusable now, whereas before she could actually use it with the mousepad. Our preparation holiday is down the drain...now we're going to have to stay in our apartment and use our desktops. Instead of a walk down to the Apple Store and a simple replacement or fix she's going to have to see a tech, wait for the tech to have the time to look at the messed up reinstallation, and then finally pay the tech for a failure caused by Apple Support. After this she'll most likely once again have to contact Apple Support to get the hardware fixed. We'll see how long this will take....she has 21 days left on the warranty. By the way and as a side note, she was promised that they will extend her warranty so that they will fix her USB problem should it be hardware related. When she asked the Apple representative to send her a confirmation email on the prolonged warranty he simply said he couldn't do that. She just had to take his word for it. Brilliant, isn't it?!?!
Jobs is a wonderful and brilliant marketer but he seems to have forgotten that the stuff they're selling are tools that can be used against them. He should carefully read the new marketing stuff instead of relying only on badly implemented parts of Kotler which seems to be the case. Or perhaps they think they've found fantastic new business model? In case of warranty issue, force the customer to crash the computer, then have them pay for it.
Are we the only ones being treated this way? Anyone else with a similar USB malfunction?
By the way, did I mention her dead pixels?
/SingSing
I'm sure this has been up for discussion a zillion times...anything less would baffle me. Excuse me for not searching earlier threads but I need to get this out of my system...now!
So, me and my wife (both students at the moment) have been working our a$$es off during the summer break and finally we're going to have a short vacation (with lots of study preparations) before the new semester begins. Or maybe I should say we had planned to get a couple of days out of town....until Apple Support entered the picture.
The thing is, my wifes MacBook Pro has had problems with the USB ports (and a couple/bunch of dead pixels...but let's leave them out of the picture for the time being) for a while and finally she figured it would be a good time to fix the problem before the warranty expires and the new semester begins. Her problem is that mice that are connected to the USB ports enters some kind of 'sleeping mode' after only a couple of seconds when not moved. Then it takes lots of movement and plenty of time (5-10 seconds...which is an eternity when working with graphic design) before the mouse reacts again. The little red light on the optical mouse is lit all the time as far as I've seen, but the laser lights up only when the mouse is back online.
Anyhoo....she gets on the phone with Apple Support who tells her that if the problem is software related she's going to have to pay for it. Fair enough...though she has not messed with weird USB-settings related to hibernation modes. She couldn't possibly find her way to that kind of setting (or any other deep tech setting) even if someone pointed a watercannon at her. Not that she's tech incompetent...she's just not interested in messing. I'm the one doing the messing...and usually I can find my way out of it. So they go about doing all and everything to make sure the problem was not software related. When she's tried all their little neat tricks they finally figure it definitely seems to be a hardware failure or malfunction. But as a last resort they ask her to backup her files and then archive and reinstall OSX with the original discs she got from Apple...just in case something goes wrong during the installation...though they never have encountered a problem or failure with a reinstall. At this point she has spent at least 3 hours on the phone with various support people. Low and behold, after the archive/reinstall the cute little bugger won't start. All it says is "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. The target does not have enough space."
So once again on the phone with Apple Support they start sending her around to different people that hopefully can get her back on track.... But now there is noone that can help her. The person she finally ends up with says that she must see a service tech and pay for it. Wait a minute...you were the ones who to begin with thought it was a software problem. Then you slowly accepted it was a hardware malfunction after meticulous and thorough digging. As a final resort, with my wife hesitating, YOU INSISTED that a reinstall had a slim microscopic chance, need I say not probably, of fixing the issue. Then this forced reinstall messes up the computer so that it's unusable. It doesn't start! It hangs! There's no way past that little box with the neat option 'Close'. Close, close, close, close....but it won't close. Now Apple Support want her to pay them to fix the problem they caused. Not only is she completely bullied by them, her computer is actually completely unusable now, whereas before she could actually use it with the mousepad. Our preparation holiday is down the drain...now we're going to have to stay in our apartment and use our desktops. Instead of a walk down to the Apple Store and a simple replacement or fix she's going to have to see a tech, wait for the tech to have the time to look at the messed up reinstallation, and then finally pay the tech for a failure caused by Apple Support. After this she'll most likely once again have to contact Apple Support to get the hardware fixed. We'll see how long this will take....she has 21 days left on the warranty. By the way and as a side note, she was promised that they will extend her warranty so that they will fix her USB problem should it be hardware related. When she asked the Apple representative to send her a confirmation email on the prolonged warranty he simply said he couldn't do that. She just had to take his word for it. Brilliant, isn't it?!?!
Jobs is a wonderful and brilliant marketer but he seems to have forgotten that the stuff they're selling are tools that can be used against them. He should carefully read the new marketing stuff instead of relying only on badly implemented parts of Kotler which seems to be the case. Or perhaps they think they've found fantastic new business model? In case of warranty issue, force the customer to crash the computer, then have them pay for it.
Are we the only ones being treated this way? Anyone else with a similar USB malfunction?
By the way, did I mention her dead pixels?
/SingSing