I had no sooner thrown up a story referencing a fictional article on the “Top Ten Apple-Related Customer Service Horror Stories”, when I realized that such a story might be kind of fun.
So give us your best and worst Apple-related horror stories — customer service or otherwise. Either throw them in “comments” or shoot me an email at seth (at) crunchgear.com . If they rock, we’ll compile them into another story that will make Diggers drool.
Hmmmm…. My iBook flaked out on me about 5 times during school. I waited at the Apple store on an average of five to six hours each time even when I had an appointment. I had to wait at least two weeks each time for the iBook to be returned. I am sure other people can beat this in descriptions of horror, but losing all your notes during finals is not cool in any world.
Akatsuki? Naruto fan? I’m mad they’ve delayed the newest episode towards next week…
Anyways Apple Customer Service horror story:
So my iPod headphones suddenly conk out on me one day. Now this isn’t a big deal b/c I have a pretty decent pair of Bose Triports that I got for my birthday, but I still don’t want to go to the gym with those on, so I send Apple a report or something over the internet.
I give them my mailing address and everything, and they say they’re sending me a new pair of headphones because these things are worth nothing to them.
Anyways, about 2 weeks later, they call my cell phone and say we can’t deliver your headphones. Apparently, instead of accepting the address I told them to deliver to (my college address), they sent them to my house.
Apparently, Apple policy at that point in time is that they can’t drop stuff off at the door, no matter what it is, and that it needs to be signed by the person who bought it or something (this is what the CS rep told me)
Well since I’m 900 miles away in the middle of term at school, I obviously can’t sign for them.
Well the CS rep was nice enough, and I give her my college address, and she says she will contact DHL to send the headphones to school address.
Fast foward 2 more weeks. A different Apple rep calls me and says the headphones can’t be delivered. Turns out they’re sending the headphones to my home address again (900 miles away). At this point I’m thinking “Man, these guys are idiots.” So enter into this argument about how I told them my address is different for 9 months of the year and that I told the CS rep earlier to send it to my school address. So finally, after heckling, this rep says she will forward my address to DHL to send the headphones to my school.
Well, it’s been about a year since those second 2 weeks, and I still haven’t gotten my headphones.
I ordered a MacBook from Apple and it had every conceivable problem, no really, if its on this Defect wiki list, I had it:
http://www.appledefects.com/wiki/index.php?title=MacBook
Furthermore, Apple ignored me for months until finally there was such a huge uproar in the online community that they acknowledged all the MacBook problems. Months later I got most of them fixed.
Long story short, I spent about 3 months with a MacBook that was stained piss yellow, was 200 degrees farenheit and melted its own case, made loud and weird noises, and on and on and on…
But I do love Apple, just avoid their first revisions!
I bought an iPod.
I know. Terrifying.
I would have before, but got spinning beachballs about 10 times while using the ifruit… XP? No problems.
I purchased the ipod nano about a year and a half ago, along with the extended 2 year service plan since i have pretty bad luck with electronics. about 3 months ago my ipod stopped updating/charging from my laptop. after trying every possible fix on the apple website i finally decided to call customer service. after spending close to two hours arguing with them over whether or not i have the extended service, having to speak to management and finally having them set up my warrantee, they finally decided they could TRY to help me. after exhausting all of the same “solutions” listed on their website, the manager told me i would need to send in the ipod for repair, or visit the store close by. since i had taken a day off from work for this (their service hours dont work with my schedule) i decided to visit the store. on my way, i got a $200 traffic ticket (not apple’s fault but i blame them anyway). when i finally got to the store, they plugged in the ipod, laughed at me and told me there’s nothing wrong with it. i tried to explain that what occurred for him, didnt happen when i plug it into my laptop, but the “genius” told me i was wrong and that it just needed to be updated. he “fixed” it. so i go home, plug it in and what do you know, it still doesnt work. so i call the store, “which genius did you speak to?” and hung up because i was so angry. i called customer service again, got disconnected twice, and finally got through to someone who knew what he was talking about. after going through the same steps and determining there was nothing wrong with my laptop, as many of their reps had tried to convince me (what a surprise, i DONT have a mac), and that it was actually the USB cable that stopped working (but still worked when plugged into the wall… you would think someone over there would have come across this before). sounds simple enough, so why did it take so long to figure out??? i received a replacement USB cable pretty quickly but had to give my credit card info as insurance that i would send in the defective one. which i did. which they claim they have not received and now i’m once again arguing with apple, this time over a $23 charge for a stupid USB cable. not a lot of money, but i’ll be damned if they get another penny out of me.