Time to visit the Apple Store...
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:46PM I got a MacBook back in March 2007, one of the plastic white ones. Unusually, I bought it on a lease and have been paying my monthly payments ever since. It reached the end of the lease about three weeks ago and I decided to keep the machine and pay around £100 to buy it outright. The lease also included AppleCare.
The Macbook has been a great laptop, with the only problem being a faulty battery, but Apple swapped that out on the spot for me a year or so ago.
Then just a few days ago, my daughter picked up the Macbook and said there was something wrong with the screen!
Oh noes....
I've just finished paying for it!
On examination, the LCD panel seems to have a great big crack going through it, but not on the glass, actually inside the panel - ouch!
It still works but the screen is obviously faulty in some way. She says she hasn't dropped it or dropped anything onto it and I tend to believe her, as there are no signs of any external damage. The laptop never leaves the house and it's mainly used for surfing the web in front of the TV.
With a heavy heart, I checked out the AppleCare on the Apple online system and to my relief, discovered it was covered for three years not two!
Phew!
Apple offer a service called ProCare in the stores that give you some extra benefits such as rapid repairs and a fast track option for the Genius Bar, along with some other services I'll probably never use. It's £77 per year but covers all your Macs so seeing as I have a few (!) and most of them I use to earn a crust, I thought it was a good investment and took out ProCare a couple of months ago.
Time to try it out, I thought.
I wanted to book a slot on Saturday morning and logged onto my local Apple store page. On the reservations page you can log in as a ProCare member and get "greater availability" of slots. Except, I couldn't logon :-(
Clicking on to the link, just took me to the standard login page with only the option of using my Apple ID. So I logged on and found they only had afternoon appointments left for Saturday. Now I could probably just turn up on Saturday morning and flash my card but I'd prefer to book in advance.
Interestingly, when I try and book through the main ProCare page on the Apple website, I get a 404 - how very un-Apple like.
It looks like a failure of the back end systems rather than the local store but it's still frustrating after paying for a service.
I just hope that they sort out the laptop with the minimum of fuss.
Reader Comments (3)
I hope you get that worked out! I've also had a lot of problems with batteries and my white MacBook. Two batteries have gone completely dead. One of them was a few months old. Couldn't get Apple to change since it happened during my first week in Ukraine. Good luck!
Ray East
BeLight Software
Welcome to my world Don! I have had nothing but problems since switching from a PC to MAc in late 2007 and your experience here gives me some solace as Apple always tell me I'm the only one who has had problems. In mind that we pay 'TOP DOLLAR' for Apple products I demand much superior customer service. Now don;t get me wrong, I love iLife and some other features to the Mac but the PC has more going for it than those Mac ads on the APple website would have you believe.... hello I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC who will give you problems but at least I'm honest about it and the hardware will not of cost you a whole heap of money when you bought it, but together we can get around it.... Apple, how's your customer service going? Well PC we get the number 1 spot for customer service but we never talk about the many users who bring things back to the Apple store, that is outside the customer service survey and such facts do not count, so we are number one.... everyone loves us....... Don your issue is quite serious when you consider the money you have paid out, why is it that 'Mac heads' never complain but just make a lame excuse when Apple fail miserably with their customer service? If you bought a fridge and it stopped producing cold air, you would want it fixed or your money back and the same goes for things such as Pro care, if you pay the extra then the website should allow you to log in as a pro care account, a 404 error is very windows and even you have to admit to that!
I had a similar problem with my daughters White MacBook (8/2008 model) except she had a vertical neon green line on the right side of her screen. Apple Care covered it without a problem and it was repaired in a matter of days. Enjoy your trip to the Apple store, there's lots of stuff to play with : )