I should have known, when I bought my MacBook Pro back in April and they had to swap it over twice in the first week for DOA faults that life with my new Mac wasn’t going to be easy. I was already on my thrid MacBook Pro and these babies cost AUS $4000 each. For that sort of price you don’t expect any problems, at least not in the first twelve months.
By the second month I’m starting to get sick of all the faults. Here is a list:
- Lower case has warped, especially around the latch area. (I believe due to overheating…)
- Two black bars on the LCD, the bar on the left is especially noticable when the screen dims. The width of these bars are the same width as the speaker grills. (Could this be due to overheating too?)
Whining Hard Drive (although resonably quiet, is still very noticable in a quiet room)- HardDrive has now died and has multiple sectors that are unreadable, including my encrypted profile. The MacBook Pro is completely unusable now. Bye Bye photos… : (
I took the unit to NextByte where I purchased it and asked them if they could swap it over for a newer model as the one I had was a “lemon”. NextByte was unable to do this and told me I should contact Apple Customer Relations directly. So I did this and spoke to a guy by the name of Kevin Smith who told me to email him with some photos of the problem with the case. I complied with his request and emailed him the pics. I heard nothing from Apple for almost two weeks, at which time I was starting to get a little bit anxious as to what was going on, so I started chasing Kevin for information. I would have thought it was in a “Customer Relations” person’s job description to be following up with the client. Hrmmm. I tried to escalate the issue to a manager and was put through to Simon’s voicemail. I left a message asking Simon to call me back as I felt as though I was being treated poorly by his agents. He must have passed tha buck because I never heard from him and Kevin eventually got back to me stating that Apple was not going to replace the unit, and the warped case was not due to a heat issue as I had claimed.
I was not happy with this response and called back trying to get hold of a Manager so I could escalate the problem. I was put through to another agent (can’t remember her name) and she wouldn’t escalate the problem either and told me to return my faulty unit to the place of purchase and they could look at it for me. So after four weeks of chasing Apple Customer Relations about my faulty Mac I was back to where I started. I was little upset to say the least. I asked to be put through to Simon (Customer Relations Manager) and was told to put it in writing and send it to her and she would pass it on. Fuck that!
Try getting hold of the “Customer Relations” manager at Apple Australia and see how you go. It seems as though all the lower level gimp staff are like his Pitt Bulls and won’t give out his details. It took some social engineering but I managed to get his details.
To save you some time they are: Simon Fenton and his email address is sfenton@asia.apple.com
So I sent Simon an email outlining all of the faults with my Mac in addition to the objections I had to the way I had been treated by his incompetent staff. I also asked him to reply directly to me and not pass my details onto one of his staff to do his dirty work. As a result of this Apple asked that I ship my Mac to them and they would have a look at it. Kevin was then tasked to organise a courier to pick up my unit…Guess what? They courier never arrived and I had to chase up Apple again. By this stage I am fed up with the whole situation and just want to throw the $4000 paper weight into the Yarra River.
I take it BACK to NextByte and ask them to just fix the problems under warranty as I didn’t need to stress of dealing with the Customer Relations fruit loops any more. Before they could do that it had to be sent to Apple in Sydney so they could look at it and close the case…OK…This has been going on now for three months and I have now been without my Mac for the last two weeks and someone has finally started working on it today. I might be able to pick it up next week…Yay!
I won’t hold my breath though.