Shiny Macbook Pros or Mall Cops

December 29, 2009

Recently my MacBook Pro has gone through a few trials and tribes including a fall from my new Timbuk2 Swig. See the Swig has a side swing out pocket and a top flap. So if I put it in top and forget the side’s open then it falls out. I have a nice heavy duty plastic case on it to keep it from bumps and bruises from every day use, but it still gets a few.

The latch broke recently and I’d been having problems with the superdrive since they installed a new one this summer. It makes this terrible screeching noise, so once the latch broke and it wouldn’t stay closed I took it in to the Apple Store. The man there said we needed to send it away and it’d be 5-7 days, but that wouldn’t work for me since I use it to teach. I decided to ship it in during Christmas while I had access to other laptops.

The day I arrived in Pittsburgh I took it to the local Apple Store after taking off the case and wiping it down. It still had the few dings I knew it had and there were one or two I didn’t know where there. The genius at the Apple Store took one look at it and looked like he was going to laugh at me. He took it in the back for a few minutes, came back out, and told me it was $1280 to fix it since I obviously “abuse” my computer. He acted like her was Child Protection Services and I just beat a child. I told him I use it daily and didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and, for the the record, the Super Drive was noisy before I dropped it.

He shrugged and told me it was still $1280 to fix. I asked him where that was in the warranty policies. He said that was an “internal figure”, so I asked him to see it in writing. He asked me to wait a minute and went into the back again. After forever (and I felt like they were calling the mall cops to remove me!) he came back out. He said it took awhile for them to find my original work order from the Chandler, AZ store who said they’d send it in; he said because they didn’t tell me about the pricing that they were going to send it in anyway. He also threateningly said that he doubted they would fix it and probably send it back still broken. I just signed the paper that said we were sending it in, thanked him, and left. I’d let the Apple people figure it out at the repair center. I just wanted a new Super Drive and new latch. That was it.

Today, the first day of the week, 8 days after I sent it in (and mind you, Christmas fell right in the middle of that repair time), they called to say it was ready. I drove over there this afternoon since I’d been without for so long. I went in and gave the lady my ID. I saw the man who’d interrogated me the week before and totally ignored him. The woman came out a few minutes later with my computer. I asked her what they’d done, and she wasn’t sure. I flipped through the paperwork and saw lots of notes that said “Damaged/Replaced” in several places, so I thanked her quickly and grabbed my machine. I wasn’t even sure if it really was my computer because it looked brand new. The dents were missing. The dings were missing. All gone. Apple Repair had replaced every piece of aluminum on the outside of the computer. All of it! It looked brand new! The top is dent free and shiny clean. The keyboard was replaced (the form said there was damage, which could’ve been cause a few letters were rubbed off, like the “A”). They also replaced the battery, which they said was going bad. Cool. They replaced the entire bottom metal part, too, which included the scratches around the CDRom slot and the part that got dented near one of the speakers. It looks like a pretty good deal to me. Take that genius!

cc licensed flickr photo by Marc Amos

Posted in mac