My Apple Genius Bar Experience
I remember the moment that I bought my 27 inch iMac. That feeling of finally reaching your goal and being able to physically feel what you have done, it was great. This behemoth started to become the main part of my filmmaking career, which was my reason of purchasing it.
However, then came one of the most confusing days of my life. I plugged my firewire cable into my camera to capture footage and then into my computer. Nothing. The camera did not show up in final cut, iMovie, or even system profiler. I knew I had a problem. I researched a bit and remembered that my sister has a MacBook with a firewire 400 port. I ran into her room and plugged my camera in, and it worked flawlessly. I was starting to get paranoid. I went over to best buy and purchased two different firewire 800 cables, obviously I would return one of them. Did the same procedure as any other time, nothing again. I was extremely worried, all of these different situations starting flowing through my head about what can happen to my iMac. Keep in mind I purchased this computer in April. So, once I got passed my panic attack, I called up Apple Care Support, which I have to say is a very nice service to have on top of hardware fix. We went through the usual repair process and they told me to just fill out an appointment form on Apple’s support page, done. I reserved an appointment for the next day and packed up my iMac. It was off to upper Manhattan.
I got a ride to the Soho Apple Retail Store and here is where the trouble began. Now, in my opinion, the genius bar representatives at this store are very rude. The entire time I was stating my dilemma they were giving an attitude pretty much saying that your 15, I am not going to listen to what you have to say. So eventually I filled out my repair form and left my iMac with them. The initial time period they had stated was 3-5 business days, it eventually turned into 15. Now, granted this is not a big dilemma as I would rather wait 15 days and have a completely working iMac than just deal with no firewire. However, this goes back to before with the Genius Bar’s attitude, the problem turned out to be a faulty logic board, which was common with the earlier 27 inch iMacs. Now, I directly told them that they should first check the logic board’s bus power since that is the probable problem in my iMac. However, they just shoved me to the side and let them do their own thing. Which is not bad in actuality, this way they know exactly how to fix the problem efficiently.
Let us skip ahead to my return to the Soho Apple Store 15 days later. This day literally changed my views on how Apple treats their customers. I went up the genius section and waited to see my iMac, I had brought my camera and cable just to be sure the port works. Can you guess what happened? Not only did the port not work, the entire logic board was not aligned properly, which I find ridiculous when you are caring for a product. So I had to leave it there for another day to allow them to align it. I thought “alright, I waited this long I could manage another day”. Six hours after I left it I got a call from the Apple Store. The man who was repairing my iMac scratched the literal lcd display of my iMac while cleaning it. I found this utterly ridiculous, so I went there the next day to see this problem and if I could not deal with the scratch. I barely noticed it, so I took it back home.
This is where the last problem happened. I had noticed once I got it back that final cut was a lot slower than previously. I checked the about my mac and found out that my iMac now had 2 gigabytes of ram, instead of the 4 it came with. I was furious, especially after the previous service. I opened up the ram slot on my iMac and noticed that the second card was in there, but broken and diagonally across from the working one. Incase you do not know, if ram is placed diagonally across than only one stick will be registered. So in other words, they knew that they broke the ram stick but did not tell me. I could be wrong but I am going with this until proven otherwise. Obviously, I called AppleCare after I figured this out. They told me they would not fix the problem as it could have been my fault when I opened the ram slot and statically charge the stick, killing it. I was extremely furious about this and to this day I had to purchase a 100 dollar ram stick just to get my ram back up to 4 gigabytes. So I had to pay for their mistakes.
Now granted, I know that others, like David, have had great experience with AppleCare. So I am stating my opinion that it depends on where you go, judging by my experience. Obviously, if your Mac, iPod, or any iOS device is having problems, do not hesitate bringing it to the apple store for help.
Dylan Brannigan Sep 30, 2010 at 8:20 PM
Reader Comments (3)
I had the same run in with my apple store. They gave me a smaller hard drive, and didn't even fix the inverter problem.
I had trouble with my apple store fixing a screen that was not properly aligned.
i had to take my MacBook 2.2GHz 2gb 120gb macbok in because it was damaged at the front bits were broken off they fixed it but then there was missing screws >:( but now i have a 2.26GHz 2gb 250gb macbook :) my mums 2.66GHz iMac's hardrive died after 4months for no reason and it was 640gb and when she got it back it was a 500GB one we called apple and they said it was orignally 500gb but good company but the NJ one is shiiitt