Scott Stewart

iExpectedmore

Other then owning an iPod today, and some casual Mac experimenting many years ago, I really haven’t had too much experience with Apple products. Recently, my oldest son started his first year of college, and as a graduation/”going to college” gift, my wife and I bought him the laptop of his choice. His choice happened to be an Apple product. We’ve always been a PC kind’a family and I’m not sure what attracted him most towards making his choice. The industry of his degree program makes heavy use of Mac’s, so I’m sure this had a lot to do with it. He has also always been a very independent, don’t really care what other people say, do, or use kind of person, and this tends to fit with Apple’s marketing. I approached the whole thing with a very open mind, and hoped to learn a little something; like with all experiences.

He called me a few weeks into college to tell me that his laptop was getting very hot under where his left palm would rest when typing. I immediately assumed a battery problem. After a few seconds of research, I found that recently there had been a few recalls on Apple laptop batteries. So, we had him pull out the battery and check it against this list of recalls. Having him do this, we realized that his battery was located under the area where his right palm rested, not his left. Not good. This probably meant his hard-drive was below the problem area. He was going to be home from school for a few days about a week after the phone call, so we made an appointment at the Apple store where we bought the laptop.

I thought it was pretty cool how we were able to make an appointment on-line for the Apple “Genius Bar”, and was looking forward to experiencing Apple’s customer service for the first time. The weekend came, and our appointment was for 11:30 AM on Saturday. We had a pretty busy agenda that weekend, and he was home from school mainly because of the events that were making for such a busy agenda. We arrived on time for our 11:30 appointment, and sure enough, hanging there behind the Genius Bar was large monitor, reassuringly broadcasting that we were scheduled for an 11:30 appointment, and were up next. We were told by a sales associate that the genius was a little backed-up, so we pulled up a couple of seats at the Genius Bar and waited. 11:30, 11:40, 11:50, 12:00, 12:10, 12:20, no Genius. At 12:20 I walked up to the front of the store, waited another 5 minutes to speak with a sales associate, at which time I was told that the guy working the Genius Bar was very busy today, and he should be with us shortly. Finally, at 12:40 he came from the back of the store to the Genius Bar and called our name.

I explained the symptoms, which were “after a few hours of use his laptop actually got hot to the touch under the area of where the left palm would rest, which seemed to sit right above his hard drive.” I was interested to find out if this was something he had heard of before with this make and modal; was it something particular to this modal that they have had some problems with? Maybe this modal had some problems with a controller overheating or something and it wasn’t even the hard drive after all? I thought maybe with the time scheduled for our ½ appointment that was now 1:10 minutes late, we could fire up another laptop of the same make and modal and swap his hard drive to see if the problem followed the hard drive or stayed with the laptop. Or so I thought. I didn’t even get to finish my first sentence about the symptoms, let alone the ideas of what we could try, when Mr. Genius states “we’ll need to send it for repair, and it will be 5 to 7 days”

I looked at him a bit perplexed, and already quite on edge for the 1:10 minute wait. “My son is home for school for this weekend, and this weekend only. He won’t be back for a few months, and I don’t want to ship him back off with a faulty laptop. I scheduled an appointment so we could talk to you about his symptoms, and perhaps try a few things to maybe rule a few others out.” “I’m sorry sir, we don’t do any actual warranty service work here, but ship that all out.” “OK, first can we talk about the symptoms? Have you seen this or heard of this happening in this make and modal.” “Well sir, if you tell me it’s getting hot, I take your word for it, and we should get it shipped out and taken care of.” “OK, I understand. However, when I bought this laptop, I got a memory upgrade. You put that in yourself correct? If I also wanted a hard drive upgrade, you would have happily have done that yourself? So, can’t we just fire up another laptop of the same make and modal, swap his hard-drive out and humor me a little.” “I’m sorry sir, we need to ship that kind of service out.”

So, after my 1 hour and 10 minute wait, my conversation with the Genius Bar guy was over in about 30 seconds. It was a dead end, and an abrupt one at that. Mr. Genius politely told us we could take our time as we think about what we wanted to do. I could tell that the only thing he wanted to do was put a check next to our name on the monitor and get onto the next person, and hopefully catch up on some lost time. It was a tongue biting moment, and if my son wasn’t sitting next to me, it probably would have gotten ugly; but I worked hard at keeping my cool. We couldn’t ship his laptop out and send him back to school with no computer. He (my son) even mentioned that he had already started a project that was due Monday, that he was going to be working on while at home. He has an external drive that he uses for back-ups (and music of course), so if it was a hard drive problem and if it fails, he at least will have his data.

So, he’s now back at school, nursing the laptop by not leaving it running all the time, and keeping data on the external hard drive. The laptop seems to be behaving fine otherwise, and maybe it will be fine for years as it is. But, it does run very hot, and over winter break, if it makes it that long, we will ship it in for the standard 5-7 days to have it looked at. I don’t know what I really expected, but it was definitely more.

So, after my first experience with Apple customer service support, all I can say is “iExpectedmore”, a lot more.