My wife got her brother's MacBook as a hand-me-down since he's picking up a MacBook Pro 17 for his design work.
It was pretty dirty, beat up, etc when she got it but it worked fine.
Until Sunday; the HD up and died. Fortunately the thing is still under warranty, so no worries (so we thought).
She took it in yesterday (made an appointment at the "Genius Bar"
) and had to wait over an hour for them to even get to her. Must have presented a nice image of customer service--a 8-months-pregnant lady with a 3-year-old and a laptop standing around waiting for ages.
Anyway, the "Genius" felt so bad that they offered to not only replace the HD under warranty, but to replace the cracked lower case. Purely a cosmetic issue. They also said they'd ship it back to us directly so she wouldn't have to come in and pick it up. Somewhat appeased, she has resigned herself to surfing on our POS Eee PC for a week.
Well, this morning the "Customer Service" people at Apple called and told us they'd replace the HD under warranty ONLY IF we paid $400 to replace the case as that wasn't covered under warranty. They "can't" replace the HD if the case is damaged.
. Unfortunately, though my wife is very cost-conscious, she isn't the bulldog type of customer that I am. Instead of forcefully reminding them that the "Genius" promised to replace the case free of charge, she asked if there were other places to have the case replaced. Sadly Fry's and Best Buy are some of the options they suggested.
I told my wife to gather up her documentation and that I'd meet her at the Apple store over lunch. Wonder how irate I'm going to have to appear to get them to honor their original commitment? I should probably warm up my shouting voice and NYC accent.
This trend of degenerating customer service is getting pretty annoying.