Making Apple - even better.
My neighbor bought his 14 year old a MacBook before Christmas. The microphone has gone bad and they called tech support. Much to his dismay, the agent wouldn't trouble shoot the issue.
Instead, he offered him Apple Care. My neighbor thinks its outrageous to have to spend the additional money during the 1 year warranty period. He did, after all, buy a "quality" product at full price. I happen to agree.
Fortunately, I never had any issues with my macs, but this is no way to conduct business, especially with a new Mac user.
They did ship him a return box and he will probably get it repaired under warranty, but it has left a bad taste. This is his first Mac, and probably his last.
Instead, he offered him Apple Care. My neighbor thinks its outrageous to have to spend the additional money during the 1 year warranty period. He did, after all, buy a "quality" product at full price. I happen to agree.
Fortunately, I never had any issues with my macs, but this is no way to conduct business, especially with a new Mac user.
They did ship him a return box and he will probably get it repaired under warranty, but it has left a bad taste. This is his first Mac, and probably his last.
Comments
My neighbor bought his 14 year old a MacBook before Christmas. The microphone has gone bad and they called tech support. Much to his dismay, the agent wouldn't trouble shoot the issue.
Instead, he offered him Apple Care. My neighbor thinks its outrageous to have to spend the additional money during the 1 year warranty period. He did, after all, buy a "quality" product at full price. I happen to agree.
Fortunately, I never had any issues with my macs, but this is no way to conduct business, especially with a new Mac user.
They did ship him a return box and he will probably get it repaired under warranty, but it has left a bad taste. This is his first Mac, and probably his last.
Apple explicitly offers 90 days of free tech support, and 1 year warranty on hardware, so it sounds like your neighbor wasn't being poorly treated, particularly.
Plus, if they were in the area of an Apple Store, they could have gotten the mic checked out pretty thoroughly, for free.
I'm not quite sure why your neighbor would find it "outrageous" to have to spend money that, as far as I can tell from your post, isn't being spent. He wasn't forced to buy Apple Care to get the warranty repair, was he? The warranty repair is being done, right?
So is the problem that the Apple rep on the phone couldn't magically make the mic work again, on the phone? If that's enough to trigger a "I'll never buy your products again" response, I can't imagine how such a person brings themselves to buy anything.
Portables are higher risk devices for damage and thus he should thought about the Apple Care as a part of the purchase.
Defects happen but I don't see what is wrong here the Apple could have done better. You build a product with many different components. One component goes bad it's not really Apple's fault unless this case is multiplied by hundreds.
Some people expect the world for a thousand bucks but the reality is one $1300 missed sale isn't going to kill Apple. I've seen people with server issues and $400 support packs get shafted.