Who says complaining doesn’t get resolution?
About two weeks ago (and two posts below) I reported that my Mac was back. Well that lasted about 2 weeks. On Friday last week it started spontanously freezing up at random times to. It could go hours without freezing up but at other times it would insta-freeze at the moment it was done booting up.
This bothered me greatly. Here was a company I basically represent at my work and my product at home was sucking badly. Hell I even convinced my mom to switch over to Apple (who is still happy to this day). On Monday night I vigorously started a report on bbb.org’s website and sent it off (first doing a triple check for unnecessary attitude as you will get no where with no company if your first, of possibly many, emails is a nasty one). I included all possible details I could such as receipt numbers, repair numbers, times I brought it in, etc. I also mentioned that the last time the technician failed to plugin the CPU fan. For the resolution I wrote that I wanted a refurbished rev C G5 or refurb rev A/D Intel Core Duo as previous companies had offered (such as HP in the past) as I certain that the machine I owned had gremlins and that I still see PowerMac beige G3s perform fine in our datacenter to this day (and they been on non-stop for 6-7 years).
However the bbb.org can sometimes take weeks to contact the company as it has to go through all these official channels. I remember that a year prior I sent an email to sjobs@apple.com asking if the iMac G5 was a good product. Considering I was going through these problems, now would be a great time to tell the team that responds to that email address that it has been far from wonderful. So off went a brief summary that I had contacted the address a year prior and that I basically have been going through hell with it. Attached was the BBB report stating that this is coming down the pipeline as well.
Less then 24 hours later I was contacted by Apple’s Executive Customer Relations team. Someone named Arin contacted me. He left a message on our answering machine at home and Cam relayed the information to me stating that someone from Apple had called. I returned Arin’s call from my desk at work but got his voice mail. We played phone tag throughout Wednesday.
Thursday morning I contacted him early and he picked up directly. This time we talked about the problems I have been experiencing and he was in full agreement that my unit needed to be replaced. At this point he offered me a new unit straight from the factory or store shelf if they had stock. I was surprised, in a very good way. All those bad thoughts I had about Apple the last few days simply were put aside by the fact that they are the extra mile to replace my bad unit. This is unlike HP where I had to convince the lady to possibly be open to providing me a refurbished unit (which I didn’t go for as it was far less superior to the unit I owned).
So summary… tomorrow I am going to the Bellevue Square Apple Store and picking up a new 20″ iMac Intel Core Duo. I am still going to be slightly reserved about the iMac and remain careful to judge it, however Apple Corporate certainly has done their part by providing me a new unit. The only cost for me is the new memory module I will have to buy as it doesn’t take DDR400 but rather DDR2667 SODIMMs.
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