When I choose a product there are a couple of factors that contribute to my choice. Being a poor student the price plays an important role. In a way I don't mind at all the crappy service at RyanAir, since they're airfares are just so much lower than most of their competitors. I really don't need a free microwaved meal, leather seats or a crappy American family movie. Some other purchases go beyond the factor of pricing. I like good coffee and am thereby ready to pay a couple of euros for a cup of freshly and correctly brewed coffee instead of getting it for free from a crappy Douwe Egberts machine. Sometimes I go for quality, sometimes for price, sometimes values, sometimes extreme coolness. Now, one and a half year ago I apparently made a big mistake. My laptop was a hand-down from my mother and was getting quite slow and outdated. I knew that a laptop was gonna play an ever growing part of my life, so I asked for a new one as a graduation gift.
That laptop was a PC and during most of my life I had worked with PC, both at school and at home, but beside that, my father had always been a Macintosh man, so I was also quite used to the Apple interface, especially the older one. Since I was used to both types of computers, old habits didn't play a huge role in my choice. So I weighed the pro's and con's of each choice and ended up buying a MacBook.
Apple products are way more expensive than PC-based products, but they have some things that PC don't have. Whenever I sat down at a café, I seriously felt way cooler tha
n the others who had those ugly, gray Dell's with all the ugly stickers and wires. My computer was white, of a beautiful design and everything was just so sleek and pretty. The interface was also easy and convenient and the computer came with a lot of programmes that were not intended for professionals, but normal people like me that wanted to take the first steps in things like movie editing and music recording.Now, I paid quite a high price for the product and thought to myself that now I was paying my way into the community of the hip and cool elite and that I was also buying a high quality product that would come with high quality service. I was wrong, 2 out of 3.
I most certainly belong to the artsy elite now, sitting with my MacBook with all it's hot-corner features and Dashboard but the product is crap and so is the service. If you're still reading I apologize for the length of this, I just prefer to get the whole story out. Now the story of my Apple Ordeal begins:
- December 2006, Klemenz, my brother, buys the computer second hand. The guy that sold it to him had bought it in USA for reselling purposes and had only turned it on once so it was literally unused.
- Spring 2007, the battery fails. I get a new one instantly and am happy with the service.
- Autumn 2007, the new battery fails. I get a new one, since I'm lucky enough to be in Iceland at the time. So, the hardware is obviously not of good quality, but at least Apple replaces it for free.
- The front or the keyboard housing starts braking apart at the edges. Apple fixes this for free but that means that I need to send it in for a couple of days. Being without a computer, even only for a couple of days, is bothering, especially if one lives in a foreign country and being away from the computer would mean being away from MSN and gmail, and thus away from far-away friends... So I decide to never mind the aesthetical faults and just ignore the problem, since it doesn't cause any other further damage. However, it does feel a bit shitty, for such an expensive product.
- I fall onto my computer, which is of course my fault only, and need to have the screen replaced. And here it is where Apples ingenious but morally wrong marketing strategy comes in. A new screen with a replacement is € 804. That's almost a new computer! But since I was insured I rather got it repaired than buying a new one, since it was fairly new anyway. Now, just the price of the screen was a robbery, but the worse part was that the repair took way longer than they promised me and when I called them to announce that I was going abroad and needed to take it with me, it hadn't been fixed yet and they told me that there was nothing I could do, they wouldn't be able to fix it in time (it had already been in their possession for three weeks). Now, I made some calls, cried a bit and voila, a nice guy named Eric fixed the same evening and sent it to Rotterdam where I could pick it up. He, however, did not have the time to fix the keyboard housing as they had promised, but told me I could bring it in again. (Which I wouldn't do, since I need my computer, both for school and for my oversea social life).
- After I got my computer back from repair I noticed that some things, that had been working before the repair (even whilst the screen wasn't working; I used my computer for a while with only half a screen working and the rest black and pink, in order to punish myself for falling on it) weren't working anymore: The right speaker did not work, making the volume very faint, but MacBooks don't have very powerful speakers to begin with. The microphone does not work, not even if I plug in an external one. The system preferences all zero themselves if I restart, so when I turn my computer on I have to go through all the settings, like making the wireless icon appear in the menu bar so that I can choose a network, setting the hot-corners (which I don't bother anymore and just use the F9 - F12 keys instead although thats not nearly as comfortable) and resetting the Dashboard (but I frequently use the dictionary). When I brought it to iFactor, my local Apple store, the tech guy told me that there was nothing he could do and I should try to... and then he spoke some geek-gibberish which a normal curly girl like me (I know there are also some technically intelligent curly females out there but I aint one of them) doesn't understand and cannot do by herself. Helpful, eh? So still no skype or musical recordings for me...
- Someone stole my charger. OK, probably it was just me who lost it, but that does not change the fact that a new one costs insanely much for a product that is mainly made up of plastic and copper wires. €89 was the price. Eighty-nine euros could buy me a ticket to Barcelona, could buy me 9 bikes from a junkie, 4 tickets to a theater show. Eighty-nine euros. For a charger. This is no Dell price. This is not a Sony price. Only Apple would charge so much for an essential accessory. I'm a poor student, for Zeus's sake. So I didn't buy one. I just used my flatmate's chargers, who were stupid enough to buy the same kind of computer as me.
- Now, one would think that getting one factory-flawed battery would be plenty of bad luck for one person, not to mention getting two. Now my third battery crashed, with the X-mark in the battery icon, like the other two, so I thought I could easily get a new one for free in just a couple of minutes like when I was back in Iceland. The guy told me that since the computer was out of warranty, being more than one years old, I couldn't get one for free. Remembering that the Icelandic Apple dude had told me that the battery itself had a warranty of one year I told him this and Dutch Apple dude said "Ah yes... OK". He didn't give me a new one, but he gave me a number and told me to call there the day after and ask for a new battery. The day after I called (since it was after office hours the day before) but the number didn't work. So I called again the day after that. Number didn't work. I asked a Dutch friend. She told me that it might be that I couldn't call a 0900 number with my phone. So they were trying to gain money from my problems with their product! How nice of them...
Remembering that the Icelandic Apple was way more helpful I called them and asked if it was true what they had told me a couple of months before, that the battery had a years warranty. She confirmed that and told me to send an email to a certain girl and ask for a pdf version of my receipt. I did that and after having to wait a couple of days and send a reminder I got the receipt.
Then I went again to iFactor, triumphantly with my receipt and asked for a new battery. The response was that the guy that handles battery replacement had gone home and would be back on monday. After having poured out of the bowls of my wrath (sorry, an Icelandic saying) another Apple guy tells me that I'll still need to call that 0900 number, which is Macintosh Netherlands, and get an OK from Macintosh, so that they could give me a new battery. A new one is €129 so it's out of the question just buying one.
I called from a friends phone and after having talked to an unfriendly dude I reached the conclusion that he wasn't just gonna give me a new battery just like that (the reason being that I hadn't bought my laptop or swapped the previous batteries in the Netherlands... Apple in Iceland never complained, even though this Mac was bought in the USA). So Inga got into bitch-mode and told him that that was OK, since I was gonna sell this rotten laptop and buy a PC. Then he all of a sudden turned a bit friendlier and told me that he would send a guy over but I would need to give him my credit-card number and they would maybe charge me for it. No way, José, don't try this on me now! Didn't have my credit-card with me anyway, so he told me to call back.
In the end I just gave up, bought a new charger since the computer was completely useless without it and have decided that I won't get the battery replaced this month, I'll just wait 'til I get home.
No comments:
Post a Comment