08-19-2009, 02:21 PM
Buck-
It's sad but it happens. Apple is, after all, a huge corporation, despite their friendly counterculture appearance. And also, sadly, most huge corporations produce procedures that deny friendliness and flexibility to their service representatives when dealing with their customers.
The other reality is that Apple SUCKS at selling to corporations. The relationship based selling that Dell et al uses is what your friend is used to- pulling the salesman's card would have gotten him a new laptop fedexed right away, or even hand carried to him. But then again, your friend is a customer. When you or I call Dell, we get "Bob" in "Georgia", who is actually in a call center in Mumbai. And we get massive run-around. Your friend is experiencing the reality of customer 'service' that most people experience.
If he had been an Apple corporate customer, it's possible he would have had better results.
Still, persistence will give results. There's no doubt that this is an engineering issue, probably a factory quality issue. From the sounds of it, a fingerprint is a clear indicator that something happened akin to Achille's experience when he was dipped in the river. Calling the engineering representative will give you results. Also being clear and consistent.
Let's face it- we engineers love a good 'failure' story. If your buddy talks to the Apple engineer long enough, he'll probably hear a few other horror stories about factory screw ups ("...and there was a chopsitck stuck in the middle of the transformer ! Can you believe that ? " )
It's sad but it happens. Apple is, after all, a huge corporation, despite their friendly counterculture appearance. And also, sadly, most huge corporations produce procedures that deny friendliness and flexibility to their service representatives when dealing with their customers.
The other reality is that Apple SUCKS at selling to corporations. The relationship based selling that Dell et al uses is what your friend is used to- pulling the salesman's card would have gotten him a new laptop fedexed right away, or even hand carried to him. But then again, your friend is a customer. When you or I call Dell, we get "Bob" in "Georgia", who is actually in a call center in Mumbai. And we get massive run-around. Your friend is experiencing the reality of customer 'service' that most people experience.
If he had been an Apple corporate customer, it's possible he would have had better results.
Still, persistence will give results. There's no doubt that this is an engineering issue, probably a factory quality issue. From the sounds of it, a fingerprint is a clear indicator that something happened akin to Achille's experience when he was dipped in the river. Calling the engineering representative will give you results. Also being clear and consistent.
Let's face it- we engineers love a good 'failure' story. If your buddy talks to the Apple engineer long enough, he'll probably hear a few other horror stories about factory screw ups ("...and there was a chopsitck stuck in the middle of the transformer ! Can you believe that ? " )