Here I am again, blogging about Apple. What can I say? It warrants a blog!
A while ago I had posted about Apple’s excellent customer service. There is nothing like that to keep a customer going back again and again to the same retailer. This, I think, is a big part of what distinguishes Macs from PCs. I had a Dell Inspiron before my current (very beloved) MacBook. Bigger screen, and I spent almost an equivalent amount ~1k on its purchase. It was a top-of-the-line notebook at that time. I was quite happy with it for a while, but as almost everyone would agree, it slowed down considerably with use, and that is really not unusual with any computer, I’ve noticed, but more about that later. So, there was this one time where the darn comp entirely crashed and refused to boot. I had to call Dell, which of course took me to a center in India. Not only was the rep entirely unsympathetic, but refused to do anything about it. After several unsuccessful attempts at dealing with the issue, I finally found a person who was willing to abide by the warranty coverage. However, this was the deal: they would send me a hard drive, I’d have to install it all by myself, and I’d have to send back my old one. I’d never done a hard drive installation, and how was I to recover any of the data? Sorry, no help there. Anyway, after that debacle, I soon bought a MacBook. Now, Jagadish is not an Apple fan and he will say they have problems too. Sometimes very bizarre ones! I mean, a melting adapter? Hmm. That was only the beginning. The Bluetooth had a mind of its own and came on and off as it pleased, and a fairly visible crack developed along the side of the right palm rest. Worse, it was just barely out of warranty! I should have gotten AppleCare, I kept telling myself. Splurging another $1200 on a laptop and not buying warranty seemed like a silly thing to have done. However, I was more than pleasantly surprised with the awesomeness of the customer service at Apple. While it did take persistence, after gently reminding me that the comp in question was indeed out of warranty, I was allowed to send it to Apple to be fixed, free of charge. Now, that did not fix the bluetooth problem, but I was happy the crack was gone and felt I could live with the bluetooth going on and off (sometimes though I’d wonder, why me?!). I have to admit, I was incredibly happy when Apple offered to REPLACE the MacBook. Wow! It was a problem they could not fix, they admitted, and simply replaced the out of warranty MacBook with a new one. Yay!
Now, almost a year later though, another problem. The fan was running incredibly loud. You turn on the machine, and you can hear it go wheeee. Well, that was going on for a few months, but I kept ignoring it because I needed the laptop for presentations, posters, etc. The second issue I was having was with the comp slowing down a little. Now this was nowhere nearly as bad as the Dell I had. I was running Illustrator, Parallels with Prism, Excel, Firefox, iChat, Mail, Skype, Preview, iTunes all at once.. so a little slowdown is expected, I suppose..but I really needed something where I could transfer files back and forth and make corrections faster to save me time when making figures of publication quality.
So I looked around for some RAM, and upgraded to 4 Gb (Corsair Value Select for ~$30 after rebate) from the 2Gb that was in there. I looked up a video on how to do it on a MacBook. Easy enough, I thought. Well, 2 of the 3 screws that needed to be removed got undone like a charm. The third was such an incredible pain, it wasn’t even funny. Like Jagadish said, there’s always that one screw! Darn it. So, the two things put together, I figured, time to pay a visit to the Apple Store. I duly took an appointment online and showed up.
“You’re having trouble with a screw?” the Apple guy asked, rather enthusiastically, I might add. “Yes”, I said, “it’s pretty darn near impossible to get it out”, “I was trying to upgrade the RAM”, I added, trying not to sound like a complete idiot. “No problem, let’s see here, do you have it on you?”. I handed over my RAM modules. “Normally we don’t do this… but I’ll be back”, he said, after taking one look at the offending screw, which was a bit stripped on the top, no thanks to my persistence in trying to get it out. About 10 minutes later (while I was playing around with the newer MacBook with the wonderful aluminium finish), he was all done and my MacBook now held 4 gigs of RAM. Wow, neat I thought, and moved onto the next issue, of the fan. He checked my Book in after ensuring I had backed everything up, and said it might take 4-7 days. Aw, I thought, goodbye MacBook for now. Just about four hours later though, I got a call from the Apple Store and get this: The comp was ready to be picked up! “Are you sure”?, I asked the lady who called, “I only dropped it off this evening!” She assured me it was completely ready, and I went back over there and brought it home, thrilled!
Moral of the story? Apple deserves the praise it gets for being what it is–quality and design, yes, but what really sets it a world apart is this incredible customer service. Kudos to them for that!
PS: 4 gigs has turned my MacBook into an awesomely speedy machine! Loving it.
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