2004–01–17

Apple iBook and PowerBook Problems

I’m a bit frustrated with Apple at the moment.

Story number one. This one is close to home. I recently sold my first 12" PowerBook to a friend. I told him that the CD drive was flakey and would need to go in for repair so we sent it in November. It came back and cd’s worked fine. Well, just this past week he tried to play a DVD and no go. So with just 10 days left on the one year warranty it is going in for repair. Apple says yup, see… you should get Apple Care for $350 which will cover repairs for three years. Okay, I can see that. It’s not a bad deal. A three year warranty for $350 is reasonable I think. Of course, after you’ve spent $1,400 or $1,700 or $2,000 on a computer you may not have the money to buy Apple Care (unless you are George “I got money to burn” Bush).

Story number two. Another friend of mine writes:

So for those of you who I haven’t told already, I got my iBook back from having the logic board replaced for the 6th time, and this time they decided to erase my hard drive as well. They claim no responsibility, even though the problem had nothing to do with the hard drive and they gave me no chance to back up my data…

That is fucked up. Apple needs to do something differently. I’m not sure what the answer is but it seems they need to handle the iBook situation better than they are. It’s not an isolated case. Evidently the iBook logic board problem is wide spread. In fact my second iBook had to go in for a new logic board.

I’d also like to see them handle other repair issues differently. For example, in story number one above, did they not test to check the optical drive before they sent it back? I’m guessing they replaced the drive and assumed it worked. So now, because they fucked up my friend looses the use of his computer for at least another week. For folks whose livelihoods depend on their computer it is unforgivable that he should have to do without because a repair technician did not take five minutes to check the functionality of a repair.