As some of you may have read in a recent post, I pondered the quality of Apple products of late.
As fate would have it, my MacBook Pro shot fire this morning. Two small flashes of yellow above the F4 key, accompanied by a “zit” noise and the machine powering off.
I called AppleCare and they immediately bumped me up two tiers – they don’t like the sound of fire.
They immediately asked if I was ok. yes. They asked if I had been injured. No. They asked if the fire department or insurance came. No.
After checking the battery, which was fine, we determined something on the motherboard, maybe a capacitor blew out.
I took it to the Apple Store and the awesome assistant manager Matt not only popped the machine right away to confirm that there had indeed been an incident, they replaced the machine right out without me even asking for such.
So I brought the machine home and restored via migration assistant from my Time Machine backup as of yesterday, which appears to have gone well. I had to reinstall XCode, but that’s because I did not want to use the full system restore. Start fresh.
They also offered to replace both of my power adaptors, just to be safe.
Excellent service indeed, no argument there.
However, sadly, more evidence that there may be something amiss in this round of quality control.
This machine is a newer revision of the same laptop, with a 40gb larger hard disk, so we’ll see if it behaves better in the year to come!
Thanks again to everyone at the Apple Store and at AppleCare – Excellent service!
The only reason you received excellent care was because the guys name was Matt. 🙂 I’m glad to hear they gave you a new machine, it would be very bad if they said “Oh yeah it’s ok we replaced x y and z.” only to send you home with a still exploding laptop. Not safe!
I too have seen a decline in Apple, not so much in their hardware (as that is simply possible with any company) but in their customer service. Then again, I called Belkin four times for support on their wifi phone and was told, four times, that I had the wrong department. I guess I’m one of the few who actually provide customer service to people that need it. (Shameless plug!)
At any rate, lets hope your issue was a fluke and that maybe you can get a longer lifespan and less issues with your new laptop! (Just don’t plug an ethernet cable into your Mac while syncing Mail, it’ll crash. Important safety tip!)
Matt