[ILUG] bringing users to Linux (RFC)

[Gareth Eason]

	   Hi,

	Apple customer service seems to be a bit of a misnomer of late, though 
I'm sure people will leap in to defend them and share their 'good 
experiences' :-)

	Standard Warranty is 1 year return to supplier or Authorised Apple 
Service Centre. This is a good thing, since I travel quite a lot with my 
laptop and it happened to break in a different country to the one in 
which I bought it. So I was quite pleased that I could return it to a 
local (same country) Apple Authorised Service Centre.

	To make a long story short - they lost my iBook and managed finally 
(after many many calls, e-mails & faxes) to send me a replacement 
machine and seperately send me the airport card (WiFi) and RAM upgrade 
which was in the original.

	I am not impressed with Apple at the moment. To make matters all the 
more galling, the fault that occurred with my machine was clearly a 
design defect (which Apple have finally admitted to.) Lots of postings 
on the web about people who had similar failures of their iBooks.

	If you get an Apple laptop (I can't really comment on their desktops) 
make sure you get Apple-Care as well. Once the 12 months expires you 
will be charged silly money if something goes wrong. And of course it's 
impossible (to my knowledge) to get replacement parts from anyone other 
than Apple.

	The apple servers I run have not yet had any faults - which is good - 
so I cannot comment on Customer Service regarding their server platforms.

	Regards,
	-->Gar

Niall O Broin wrote:
> On Wednesday 2 April 2003, wesley at yelsew.com (Wesley Darlington) wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 01:22:57AM +0100, Silent Partner wrote:
>>
>>>If quality support was the issue, everybody would use macs.
>>
>>I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. AIUI, Apple's hardware
>>support is limited to "Send it back to us and we'll have a look at it".
>>And that's the support you pay extra for. The bog standard support is
>>"Yup, it sounds broken. Hate tha'!". And that only for 90 days. Eeek.
> 
> 
> Their standard warranty in these islands is 1 year. If you buy
> AppleCare, you can extend that to 3 years which is on-site for desktops,
> but call and collect for notebooks, which sucks. A regular on the IRC
> channel (not sure if he's on-list or not) had to send his iBook back to
> Apple and the lost the bloody thing.
> 
> 
>>I imagine their support for their server hardware is better than this,
>>but frankly if they can't do a decent, well-priced on-site maintenance
>>contract for their laptops and desktops, I'm not going to go buying
>>anything from them any time soon. :-(
> 
> 
> Yes, lack of on-site for notebooks is very annoying. If the Intel
> hardware sellers can do it, I don't see why Apple can't.
> 
> 
> Niall