F-ing Apple...Now I'm Mad

But as I mentioned previously, I unfortunately had to send back my MBP because the second DIMM slot (for adding RAM) was dead. The Apple support person sent me a shipping label which I should use to ship the machine back. Here starts the beginning of an aggravating process...

Apparently they were also supposed to send me a kit that would provide me all the shipping materials needed to send back the machine. Yeah, not so much. Nothing arrived and when I called back, they said it was a mistake in their system and that I could just use any box to send it back instead of waiting for a new kit to be sent. When I first got my iPod a few years back, it, too, had a problem. Not only did Apple overnight a shipping box, but all service was done via overnight shipping and I literally had my replacement 3 days after first reporting my problem. Needless to say, I was very impressed. I wish I could say the same this time.

I live in New York City and I had to ship the MBP back to Elk Grove, California....via Ground shipping. See, that's the label they sent, and I couldn't change it without having to pay for the shipping myself. If this is something that's their fault, why not offer the same Overnight service that you provided with my iPod? So I mailed it out on July 3rd, and it finally arrived yesterday, July 11th. It was a long week of constantly pinging the FedEx tracking system to see if it arrived!

I waited until late last night to hit up the Repair Status site to see what the story was so that I could get an estimate on a return delivery date. I kept getting a "Status not available" message when I entered my Repair ID, even through this morning, which should have been more than enough time to process the return. Since my machine was technically a custom order (I upgraded the RAM and the hard drive when I first purchased it), I knew that it had to come from China, which is where the machines are built. I also had a strange feeling that it was going to be ground shipped back to me (after waiting a week for the order to be processed, based on my previous experience, which would have put the guess-timated date near the end of July). That didn't fly with me, so coupled with the "Status not available" message, I decided to call the AppleCare Support Line to see what was up.

(To this point, my real problem was just that it had been a slow process, which is annoying when you're excited from something. I'd be OK with things if that were it. But...)

Upon reaching an AppleCare support person (I have to say, they are very good about short wait times), she read the case notes and said that she had to transfer me to a Sales support person. OK, fair enough. A short wait later, and a guy comes on the line to introduce himself. He, too, reads through the case notes and says that, despite multiple notes in the log that the machine needed to simply be swapped for a new one, a refund was issued to my account and that the case what closed.

Wait, what?!

Yes, somebody on their end, despite the numerous notes to replace the machine, issued a refund to my account rather than processing a replacement. Since the refund was already issued, the case is now closed and the only way to get a MacBook Pro is to order a new one! Oh, and I can't get a refund right now on my AppleCare support plan. That's a separate issue. Are you kidding me?! I don't even own the machine anymore and I still have to go through the hassle of a separate call to cancel that?! All I got was "I'm sorry this happened. Do you want to buy a new one?" as a reply. I was floored. I also believe that he was sorry, but sorry doesn't fix the problem.

So now I'm furious because of all the lost time and I'm seriously reconsidering whether or not I want to buy another one. As I said, the MacBook Pro, both the machine and the software stack that comes with it, is pretty sweet. But this experience leaves an awfully bad taste in my mouth with Apple's support. Further, Intel's about to announce the Core 2 Duo availability. How do I know if Apple is going to announce less than a month from now at the Worldwide Developers Conference that they are bumping up to that chipset (which offers better performance, and, more importantly for a laptop, lower power consumption). As usual with my luck, I'll have bought something that is significantly upgraded literally a few weeks later. And lastly, in my brief experience, I found that it was a bit harder to run certain must-have applications without having to "trick" the system. From ColdFusion MX's startup quirks to the lack of Flex Builder to the lack of TiVoToGo, I found myself in Parallels a bit more often that I thought I'd be. Perhaps that's just the "lifeboat" reaction of going back to something familiar. But it also seemed crazy to have had to switch my system's loaded JVM just to fire up ColdFusion (The OS relies on JDK 1.5 but ColdFusion doesn't support that).

Frankly, I'm not sure what to do at this point. I have to say that just writing this out has been therapeutic in a way because I am starting to cool down a bit. And while most who happen to read this are likely thinking "that was just a one-off bad experience," well, when it happens to you it doesn't make you feel any better. I'm going to see what Dell has going on right now and take a couple of days to do another comparison and see if things have changed. In the meantime, it's back to my old, painfully slow laptop where I can't run half the applications I need to due to lack of resources.