Every Company Should Act More Like Apple
I am a relatively new Apple customer. It all started in early 2007 when I purchased a white 13.3″ MacBook.
It was more of a novelty as I had no prior experience with a Mac. I never really used it, not because of OS X but because my desktop setup was just too good. All that monitor space, no need for a laptop. This is still the case today although I am beggining to bring it into work and use it a little more often.
My Apple purchase continued in late 2007 when I bought the iPhone. Loved it. I had some problems with it though.
Some of my previous posts have talked about my on-going problems with the iPhone. My first one couldn’t hold a charge, my second one dropped calls like crazy and my third one I cracked the screen. Each and every time I brought the phone into the Apple store in Providence it was replaced on the spot, no questions asked. Yes, even when I cracked the screen!
Now, back to my MacBook. I bought it in early 2007 and it hasn’t gotten much usage, except for when I travel and it is out of warranty with no Apple Care.
I recently decided to use Boot Camp and install Vista on a partition (I know….). Well, the 60GB default harddrive just isn’t enough so I bought a much bigger drive from NewEgg.com and it arrived earlier this week.
I pop in my Leopard DVD to install it and what do you know? The DVD drive doesn’t work! Well, that sucked. Had this been a desktop I could have easily bought a new drive cheaply and installed it in 5 minutes, not the case here with my MacBook.
I brought it to the Genius bar at the Apple store and they explained to me it would cost around $250, a bit much and at this point I was just going to junk the MacBook and get a new one. I thought better of it and called 1-800-MY-APPLE and asked to speak to a supervisor.
I explained to him (Jason) that I’ve probably used the DVD drive 10 times since I purchased it and it was working fine the last time I used it, yadda yadda yadda. Sure enough, with almost no questions asked, Jason tells me he’ll place an out-of-warranty exception on the DVD drive.
There you have it. Once again Apple’s customer support has gone above and beyond for me. A brand new DVD drive was installed in my MacBook about an hour later!
I am going to make a post in the near future about the downsides I see in Apple, such as iPhone 2.0/3G, but customer support is not one of them.
