01-16-2013, 02:01 AM
If you want to skip all the drama, just go to the bottom for some potentially useful "secret" Apple tips I recently learned.
So my father in law, who was a Dell guy, decided when he moved up here to get a Mac. He's well-to-do, and wanted a big screen, so I helped him get a 27" i5 iMac, with two years of AppleCare last year. Unfortunately, it was the one that had the problematic 1 TB drives, and he got notified of the recall.
No sweat- there's a nearby Apple store, and the drive hadn't died. As this was before the holidays, and they were swamped at the store, I said we've got until April for the hard drive recall, we'll wait until after the holidays, and the folks at the Apple store were grateful.
After the holidays, he wants to get this done, cause his previous Dell's hard drive died and he lost some things, so I ask the folks at the Apple store if it's a better time to bring it in. Yeah, that'd be great. I knew the actual repair only takes an hour or so.
So we back him up and take the iMac Sunday, and we make an appointment Monday AM for my wife to bring it in. When she comes back, she says they said 3-5 days. Really? This is his only computer and his connection to the world, so I'm hoping they're just sandbagging.
On Wednesday, no word, so I call the Apple store and find out you can't talk to a person any more. You get a recording that says it can understand sentences. What's the problem? "Hard drive recall". "I understand you want to make a return". "No-umm, Representative!" "I understand you want to make a return". Or press one for a Genius Bar appointment, or two for telephone technical support. Gah!
So I go down to the mall, and ask the greeter about the iMac. Using her mike, she checks- haven't gotten to it yet. "Do you have the parts? Is the repair done here?" Yeah, we just haven't gotten to it. "Do you have any idea when you might?" Nope. We'll call you, sometime. Go away.
Long story short, it gets done late the next day, and we get it on Friday. I'm a little irked that even buying AppleCare, for a recall of a defective part, you have to bring it in, it takes a week, and not only do you end up with a wiped (new) disk, it comes back with 10.7 and it left with 10.8 (downloaded, of course).
So when we get an email from the Apple store asking how we did, I kind of let em have it.
Turn out the manager calls me that night. Apologizes. Say yeah, people don't like the voice recognition answering. Says he'll pass on my various feedback suggestions. Nice guy, and we had a civil conversation, tho I hope his job isn't having to do this every day.
Anyway, he gives me two tips:
When you call the Apple store, if you say to the voice recognition thingy "I want to talk to the manager", he says it'll get you to a real person. Yay!
And if you have AppleCare or are still in warantee, you can go to https://expresslane.apple.com where you can write down what the problem is, tell them when you want them to call, and they'll call you at that time, prepared to fix that particular problem that you're having, instead of having to hold, explain the problem, and have them go through some damn support script. (I see that this has been mentioned by Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5637618/apples-expres...rt-service) before, but I'd never heard of it.)
Haven't actually tried either one of these -hope he wasn't just feeding me a line of crap-but I thought I would pass them on.
PS- if you find yourself in this situation, the easiest recovery seems to be Carbon Copy Cloning the whole drive to an external, then erasing the new drive when you get your Mac back, booting from the external (may need to be FireWire?), and CCC'ing everything back to the new drive. I originally went through the "welcome to Mac" setup the new drive ran, and tried to import from the external, and you end up with multiple accounts and problems. Just use CCC.
So my father in law, who was a Dell guy, decided when he moved up here to get a Mac. He's well-to-do, and wanted a big screen, so I helped him get a 27" i5 iMac, with two years of AppleCare last year. Unfortunately, it was the one that had the problematic 1 TB drives, and he got notified of the recall.
No sweat- there's a nearby Apple store, and the drive hadn't died. As this was before the holidays, and they were swamped at the store, I said we've got until April for the hard drive recall, we'll wait until after the holidays, and the folks at the Apple store were grateful.
After the holidays, he wants to get this done, cause his previous Dell's hard drive died and he lost some things, so I ask the folks at the Apple store if it's a better time to bring it in. Yeah, that'd be great. I knew the actual repair only takes an hour or so.
So we back him up and take the iMac Sunday, and we make an appointment Monday AM for my wife to bring it in. When she comes back, she says they said 3-5 days. Really? This is his only computer and his connection to the world, so I'm hoping they're just sandbagging.
On Wednesday, no word, so I call the Apple store and find out you can't talk to a person any more. You get a recording that says it can understand sentences. What's the problem? "Hard drive recall". "I understand you want to make a return". "No-umm, Representative!" "I understand you want to make a return". Or press one for a Genius Bar appointment, or two for telephone technical support. Gah!
So I go down to the mall, and ask the greeter about the iMac. Using her mike, she checks- haven't gotten to it yet. "Do you have the parts? Is the repair done here?" Yeah, we just haven't gotten to it. "Do you have any idea when you might?" Nope. We'll call you, sometime. Go away.
Long story short, it gets done late the next day, and we get it on Friday. I'm a little irked that even buying AppleCare, for a recall of a defective part, you have to bring it in, it takes a week, and not only do you end up with a wiped (new) disk, it comes back with 10.7 and it left with 10.8 (downloaded, of course).
So when we get an email from the Apple store asking how we did, I kind of let em have it.
Turn out the manager calls me that night. Apologizes. Say yeah, people don't like the voice recognition answering. Says he'll pass on my various feedback suggestions. Nice guy, and we had a civil conversation, tho I hope his job isn't having to do this every day.
Anyway, he gives me two tips:
When you call the Apple store, if you say to the voice recognition thingy "I want to talk to the manager", he says it'll get you to a real person. Yay!
And if you have AppleCare or are still in warantee, you can go to https://expresslane.apple.com where you can write down what the problem is, tell them when you want them to call, and they'll call you at that time, prepared to fix that particular problem that you're having, instead of having to hold, explain the problem, and have them go through some damn support script. (I see that this has been mentioned by Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5637618/apples-expres...rt-service) before, but I'd never heard of it.)
Haven't actually tried either one of these -hope he wasn't just feeding me a line of crap-but I thought I would pass them on.
PS- if you find yourself in this situation, the easiest recovery seems to be Carbon Copy Cloning the whole drive to an external, then erasing the new drive when you get your Mac back, booting from the external (may need to be FireWire?), and CCC'ing everything back to the new drive. I originally went through the "welcome to Mac" setup the new drive ran, and tried to import from the external, and you end up with multiple accounts and problems. Just use CCC.
