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Comment by caldwell | Hacker News Reader

I actually had a similar interaction with Apple on a smaller scale. I had just ordered a magic mouse for my sister's fiancee for Christmas. I talked to my sister after purchasing it online and she told me that they were in an Apple store the day before and he had mentioned that he wanted a magic pad.

Shit.

So I called up Apple asking if I could return the magic mouse that I ordered online for the trackpad in a store because there wouldn't be enough time with Christmas fast approaching. The customer support guy put me on hold for a minute and then told me that in light of the Holiday Spirit they would send out a trackpad with express shipping free of charge. I could return the magic mouse if I wanted or keep both.

Fed Ex ended up dropping the ball on the express shipping, but still Apple stepped up and made my day! I ended up giving him the magic mouse for Christmas and then the trackpad a month later for his birthday.

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Apple's service is, bar none, the best I've ever received from any technology company.

A couple of years ago my MacBook Pro was conking out - graphics tearing probably caused by bad VRAM.

I called them up, and having had a DVD drive and a latch fixed in the past, they informed me (voluntarily! without me asking for it!) that given the number of repairs done on this machine they'll just send me a new one instead of going through another round of repairs. This is also with ~2 minutes on hold, and talking directly to a human instead of navigating the touch-tone gauntlet.

They sent me a return shipment label to start the process - I told them that I really can't be without a machine for a whole week while they sent out the replacement. They didn't argue or be difficult, they just decided right then to ship me my new machine and I can ship back my old one at my leisure.

Did I mention I got a unibody MacBook Pro out of the deal despite being 2-3 generations out of date at that point? They replaced the MBP with the latest and greatest instead of sticking me with an old-gen refurb as is standard for hardware replacements.

That singular experience has made me an Apple laptop customer ever since.

The best part? My roommate at the time was dealing with a conked out Dell laptop, so were on the phone with our respective support lines simultaneously. Between dialing the number and finalizing the shipment details of the new laptop I took about 25 minutes end to end. He spent the next 7 hours arguing with Dell. On the other hand, after those 7 hours of pure customer service pain, they sent someone out that fixed the machine same-day... so his resolution was faster, but considerably more painful.

Are you signed up for Apple Care?

My bluetooth adapter doesn't work, and I can't send in my laptop till this summer since I do iPhone development for my school. By then though, I'll be pushing it really close to the end of my 1 year warranty.

I was on AppleCare. The only time extended warranty has ever been worth it. I've been religious about AppleCare on laptops ever since.

There were known NVidia graphics hardware defect issues with MBPs of roughly that vintage, so if that was the problem, you should have received similar service even if you were not covered by the AppleCare extended warranty.

Mine was a ATI chip unfortunately. The problems were all in the end related to a broken latch - broken latch interfered with sleep mode, which meant that occasionally the laptop would spend a few hours in a laptop sleeve, fans going full blast, failing to go to sleep. I'm pretty that cooked the VRAM and DVD drive.

The non-unibody MBPs had a lot of functionality tied to the ridiculously complex lid latch. If the latch broke the laptop was SOL.

Oops, I was mistaken—it was the ATI Radeon X1600 that had problems in early MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo machines.

That's what I miss about Dell. I bought a 800 UKP laptop with 3year onsite warranty. After 6months the touchpad went wrong.

They sent out 12 on site repair visits replacing the touchpad (including 2 trips with the wrong part and 2 to replace bits of the case the previous guy broke) before deciding it was the motherboard that was faulty.

The onsite repair is done by a 3rd party who bill Dell 250 UKP for each visit. They spent almost 4x the cost of the machine repairing it - but Dell company policy is not to replace machines more than 30days old.

Funnily enough that was the last Dell laptop I bought and last place I ordered Dell servers for.

Amazon gave me great service when they had to do a warranty replacement for my Kindle. It took 2 minutes at 2:30am to convince the guy to send me the replacement. My wife being from Canada didn't believe such customer service even existed, but back in the UK I bought everything through Amazon and they were always great.

I did find out in the process that FedEx is as incompetent piece of shit as it was in the UK. The delivery guy left the package in the hallway to my apartment building and obviously forged the signature required as it was an international expedited and insured delivery.

Amazon is great for that, when I got my Kindle I was perhaps a bit too rough with it. It was the week after I had gotten it as a birthday present and I didn't have a case yet but I wanted to bring it with me for a train trip. I threw it in a bag with books, keys and other loose materials and the next time I tried to turn it on, the screen was completely broken.

I called up Amazon support and explained the situation to them, being completely honest about how rough I was with it. I was pretty confident they'd just say it was my fault and make me pay for repairs but instead they simply got my Amazon account details off me and sent a new one right away. I mailed the broken one off a few days later and didn't have to wait too long for the replacement despite being in Australia.

Great customer service.

This is to be predicted, as if you don't have a working Kindle you are not going to buy e-books for it, where they make most of their money on that product line. Companies that have high margins ("the Apple tax") or secondary markets (Amazon, and again Apple with iTunes) have good support because they a) can afford to have it and b) can't afford not to have it: a lost customer is a loss of thousands of dollars of future profits; for most companies you can talk about thousands of dollars of revenue, but the actual profit to be lost from an ex-customer are so low as to make even hiring support staff untenable (most hardware companies), and when they are required the staff are often gulags with very very strict service/refund quotas (telecom companies).

I've had FedEx sign for packages left at my front door with "Mr F. Door".

You pay a little more for hardware, but Apple usually outdoes itself in support.

At the 3 year mark I decided to replace the optical drive on my macbook with a big hard drive and use an SSD to boot. Three weeks later the computer is dead. I reverse the process. Still dead. Both hard drives worked, but I couldn't test the other parts.

I took it to the Apple store and the genius said they couldn't look at it since it had been modified. I was bummed but knew it was a long shot. The store sends a follow up email survey and I say I had at least hoped I could find out if the machine was salvageable - I'd get a new logic board if that would fix it - or consider a new laptop.

The store manager calls the next day and has me explain exactly when I did and what happened in the store and says they can send it to an Apple warehouse and for ~$200 they'll fix anything that is broken and return it in a week. I took him up on that.

The next day I get a call that my computer is ready. No warehouse. No charge. They fixed it in the store, replacing the internals. I admitted I was probably the reason the machine died. All I wanted was to see if they could just test the logic board so I knew how bad the problem was. And Apple repaired it, well out of warranty, for free.

I probably would have bought a new computer from them had they said it was toast. I didn't hesitate to buy another mac a year later.

You pay a little more for hardware, but Apple usually outdoes itself in support.

To be clear: that money is going to support.

Oh, no doubt. But they handle it pretty well.

Their coverage is crap, but support for TMo is one of the best out there. If there was only a way we could combine the best of both worlds -- Apple & TMo's support without being tied to AT&T.

If it would not be a hug expense for them (not to mention wrong market), having Apple take over TMo, build out a world class 3G infrastructure coupled with world class support, I'd be seriously happy.

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