History will record that in the first seven weeks of owning this new MacBook Pro, I will have only gotten to use it productively for three. First I lose two weeks right off the bat as Apple’s online store inexplicably takes forever to ship the thing to me. Then I lose another week due to a bug in the Migration Assistant software that I was only finally able to solve at the end of a twenty-hour troubleshooting marathon (deeply nested subfolders creating overly long file path names, for the record). Then I get my three weeks of using the thing, thinking I’m in the clear until the screen decides to erupt into some kind an avant garde-looking cross cross pattern which most likely means the machine has had a defective video cable from the get-go which simply took a little while for the thing to actually burn itself out. So for the next week I hope it’s actually just some one-time software glitch but instead see the problem gradually getting worse, and now I take it to the Apple Store and they tell me that they can’t swap out a simple video cable in the store and they’ve got to ship it off somewhere and I’ll be without it for at least another week. So in the nearly two months since my new MacBook Pro was supposed to arrive in my hands, I’ve had less than 50% uptime – and the various problems have all been various degrees of irresponsible mistakes by Apple.
Right now I am the definition of an unhappy customer.
So for now I’m sitting here banging away on my old MacBook, which by all rights I should have been able to find a new home for by now, but which now I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to fully part with. This old MacBook has itself had ten different hardware components replaced over the years, the embodiment of a lemon, and one of the reasons why I was eager to move to a newer laptop when I did was because I refuse to continue relying on this old MacBook once its warranty expires in May. But seeing as how my new MacBook Pro has the early scent of lemon all over it as well, I’m now thinking I’ll need to keep the old MacBook around as a backup for the time(s) when the new one ends up in the shop.
I’m the first one to jump all over any journalist who ends up with a defective unit due to simple statistical unluckiness and then tries to spin an imaginary story about how it means the whole product line is somehow defective, just to make themselves feel better – I know for a fact that the vast majority of Mac laptops sold last for years without any hardware failures of any kind. But from where I’m sitting, Apple has sold me two lemons in a row. Okay, my bad luck. But it’s given me a front row seat to their repair policies. And if they’re going to insist on (repeatedly) repairing lemons instead of replacing them, then they need to do away with this “we’ll ship it off somewhere and you’ll see it in a week or two” nonsense, and start doing laptop warranty repair right there in the store – especially when it’s as simple as something like a bad video cable. Apple’s laptop repair policies seem to be based on the assumption that anyone who owns a laptop uses it strictly as a supplemental or travel computer and has a desktop at home which can be used while the laptop is being slowly repaired at some undisclosed location. But that’s a sentiment from the year 1997 if I’ve ever heard one. The whole point of the Apple retail stores is supposed to be so that the company can provide the kind of professional representation of its products that it wants out there, instead of the shoddy representation that Macs were getting in electronics junk stores like Best Buy and CompUSA for years.
Well you know what? Taking your brand new laptop in for a simple warranty repair and being told you won’t see it for another seven days or more feels an awful lot like a junk store experience, not an Apple one. Except, come to think of it, even most of the junk stores manage to repair laptops on-site without having to ship them out.
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