Apple Goofed, Again

As per the description in a previous blog entry, I sent in my PowerBook for repairs last week. I got the machine back Wednesday last week to find not one but three new things about my dear computer.

1. Apple replaced the hard drive. Somewhat of a let-down, but I did have a backup of most everything I needed, so it’s not a huge loss. A blessing in disguise, actually: I’ve been meaning to reformat the machine and have a nice fresh clean start, I just hadn’t gotten around to it, and was kind-of waiting for Mac OS X Tiger to be released.
   

   
2. Apple managed to rip off one of the feet of my PowerBook, as per the pictures above. The first picture is what a normal ‘foot’ on a PowerBook looks like: a dark grey circular rubber pad mounted on a light gray circular piece of plastic. The second picture is what a missing ‘foot’ looks like: no dark grey circular rubber pad mounted atop a light gray circular piece of otherwise-very-empty-looking-not-to-mention-abrasive plastic.
3. Apple also managed to put some very light abrasions dead smack in the middle of my PowerBook’s LCD. To the untrained eye, they’re pretty invisible, but I can see them fairly clearly, especially when doing graphic design on a pixel-by-pixel level. The abrasions cover about a square inch of the screen and are shallow enough not to be noticeable to touch.

I called Apple’s support line immediately when I found out about (2) and (3) — which was when I got home that day after picking up the laptop from my local authorized service location. After a few minutes of hold time, another few minutes of talking to the lower-tier support dolts, and then yet another few minutes talking to a ’support specialist’, I had Apple’s rep apologizing to me and filling out a dispatch for a self-addressed prepaid-shipping box and packaging materials to be sent out to me. The support specialist said that she had put in the dispatch details that everything should be already paid for by Apple and there should be no cost to me at all. After a little bit of a fruitless run-around trying to get the dispatch to work through my local authorized service location rather than shipping directly to me (so as to shave off a day or two from the downtime I’d experience), I confirmed that I wanted the dispatch sent, and received the said materials in the mail two business days later.

As a side note, this may actually be another blessing in disguise: I do happen to have a dead pixel on my LCD and, while this is unacceptable to me, it is apparently acceptable to Apple — their LCD warrantee policy clearly states that an LCD with up to five dead pixels is ‘acceptable’. The Apple support specialist told me that they would have to replace my LCD. Also, seeing as how LCDs diminish in brightness with time, a new one might be a nice refresher for me and my laptop.

I plan on sending the laptop out on Monday in the hopes that I get it back sometime during that week — I’d really rather not be down over an entire weekend (these are the days I get the most work done).