My first syadmin gig was at an options trading firm with Macs on the desktop and a mix of Mac and Unix in the back office. I'm not unfamiliar with the variety of ways they can fail. In addition, jadegirl's been a Mac user as long as she's owned computers. In the time I've owned my Dell, she's gone through 3 MacBooks. Her current box is the one with a breathtaking failure rate, but all three had to go into the shop at one time or another.
It has always been a hassle. Always. By design. It may be different in your neck of the woods, but here in NYC you need a reservation to get your Mac looked at. You get a reservation by going online and setting it up on their web page. How they expect you to do this with a non-functioning computer, I don't know. When we've tried to do it over the phone, the cyber maze would not let us. What we've wound up having to do is go in and hope they can squeeze us in. Sometimes they can, sometimes not, but we at least leave that day with an appointment. By "go in," I should point out that I mean either an hour-long subway ride or a half-hour car ride with Manhattan parking fees.
Diagnosis has always been easy: fried hard drives and dead logic boards are not subtle. Time and again, after a 2-minute diagnosis process leading to a concrete remediation plan I am told that there will be at least a 24 hour turnaround time for a hardware swap. This can only be by policy, either because management can't be bothered to keep the necessary resources on hand to perform a 5-minute task in 5 minutes, or because so many people are needing the task done that there is a backlog days long.
When the logic board fried last month, I requested a replacement and was refused. The Apple store manager told me that if it fail a fourth(!) time, he'll replace it. I have every expectation that I will have to fight for that replacement, in April if the machine maintains its current MTBF.
In the meantime, I'm left with a very different experience with my Dell. The computer I'm writing on is an Inspiron XPS -- they hadn't yet spun XPS off to its own line. I bought it in January 2004. The one hardware failure it had was a fan, and I had 12 hours of downtime because that's how long it took them to have someone drive to my home with the necessary hardware and fix my computer. It may be that if I had more support calls with Dell I'd have had more experiences as disastrous as what I now regard as a normal Apple tech support experience, but the comparative sample sizes is part of my point.
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Date: 2008-11-25 07:12 am (UTC)It has always been a hassle. Always. By design. It may be different in your neck of the woods, but here in NYC you need a reservation to get your Mac looked at. You get a reservation by going online and setting it up on their web page. How they expect you to do this with a non-functioning computer, I don't know. When we've tried to do it over the phone, the cyber maze would not let us. What we've wound up having to do is go in and hope they can squeeze us in. Sometimes they can, sometimes not, but we at least leave that day with an appointment. By "go in," I should point out that I mean either an hour-long subway ride or a half-hour car ride with Manhattan parking fees.
Diagnosis has always been easy: fried hard drives and dead logic boards are not subtle. Time and again, after a 2-minute diagnosis process leading to a concrete remediation plan I am told that there will be at least a 24 hour turnaround time for a hardware swap. This can only be by policy, either because management can't be bothered to keep the necessary resources on hand to perform a 5-minute task in 5 minutes, or because so many people are needing the task done that there is a backlog days long.
When the logic board fried last month, I requested a replacement and was refused. The Apple store manager told me that if it fail a fourth(!) time, he'll replace it. I have every expectation that I will have to fight for that replacement, in April if the machine maintains its current MTBF.
In the meantime, I'm left with a very different experience with my Dell. The computer I'm writing on is an Inspiron XPS -- they hadn't yet spun XPS off to its own line. I bought it in January 2004. The one hardware failure it had was a fan, and I had 12 hours of downtime because that's how long it took them to have someone drive to my home with the necessary hardware and fix my computer. It may be that if I had more support calls with Dell I'd have had more experiences as disastrous as what I now regard as a normal Apple tech support experience, but the comparative sample sizes is part of my point.