Apple's customer service is hell. Don't envy anybody to have to deal with this.
The "Cosmetic damage and not covered by warranty" line is similar to what I had as answer when after one week of sitting on a desk without any mistreatment I had a crack in the glass of my pre-retina MBP.
Called them and had an endless loop of
- "I think this is a manufacturing fault"
- "Cracks in the screen are ALWAYS accidental damage and not covered under warranty"
- "But I didn't have an accident with it, so ..."
- "Cracks in the screen are ALWAYS accidental damage and not covered under warranty"
... and so on and so on.
Now, after the most recent graphics board meltdown I am on an XPS13 with Ubuntu, and I can honestly say that apple are off my shopping list for good.
Just to show this is anecdotal, I have been using Apple notebooks for many years and have only ever had one problem. That problem was a defective trackpad. The Apple Store replaced the computer outright with the newer model as they were unable to get the part within seven days due to Christmas holidays. I hear good and bad things about customer service of all sorts of companies, but more often than not I have heard positive things about Apple.
Apple is probably the only company that comes to mind when I try to think of positive customer service experiences. Even when my apple care expired they still helped me.
My MBP is now 6 years old, still trying to get my employer to replace it. The only problems I had were the HDD going bad (I replaced it with SSD) and the trackpad no longer works (i spilled a drink on it once or twice). I also dropped is in the street a couple times which could have contributed to the HDD failure.
Overall I've never owned any other devices this long with continuous use. With all that being said they are going to need to change their approach on this issue or they risk damaging that support reputation.
I've had very good experiences with Dell both in Japan and Poland.
[Japan] One day the fan of my Latitude started making a clicking noise so I called the service, scheduled a visit for the next Saturday and got the fan replaced, even though the noise didn't occur when the serviceman was testing it. In the process of replacing the fan he noticed my case is missing two rubber feet and promised to send me a replacement. A week later I got a whole bottom part of the case in mail.
[Poland] My dad had some problems with BSODs on his Vostro and after a bit of back and forth with the service they replaced the whole motherboard for him. Almost 3 years into warranty, 1 month before it expired.
If I ever decide to go back to Windows or Linux I'm going with Dell and their NBD warranty.
I've had pretty great repair service from Lenovo in January of this year, and with Acer in 2013. Both are for devices I purchased as a private consumer, not as a big contract corporate client.
I've had some terrible experience with Lenovo around 2010, so this may be hit or miss, but Apple is certainly not the only company that can provide decent service.
I don't think the defect is the problem but rather the communication on Apple's part. Problems happen, people in IT are most probably used to that. But a company should just admit the error and move on.
I personally had the same experience as GP (but ages ago): Bought an iBook G3 that had multiple main board faults every few months (that was a problem of the whole series). In Germany you can get your money back if a product has the same fault multiple times (i.e. the manufacturer is unable to fix the issue). Both Apple and Gravis, the retailer, acted so horribly despite the perfectly clear law and a clear paper trail of the multiple defects that I had to hire a lawyer to get my money back. Of course I'll never buy anything Apple again - not because of the defects (as said, that can happen to every manufacturer) but rather because of the awful response.
At my company we all use Apple hardware besides screens and one surface and we have a failure rate of around 70% over two years for our MacBook Pros. We had 2 with the graphics problem and 7 had disk failures. 2 others had failing keyboards and trackpads. But since it was always in the 2 year span we didn't had any problems to get them repaired.
The difference, I think, is that Apple KNOWS about certain problems, e.g. Trackpad. If there's no water damage, then it's clearly a manufacturing defect. In OPs case, they thought he was lying because they'd never seen that issue happen without accidental damage.
A similar thing happened with an HP laptop I owned. They had problems with hinges breaking for no reason other than poor design. I searched online and found a bunch of people had the problem and some got it replaced as a manufacturing defect. I tried for months to get HP to do something about it. Finally I went to my boss who at the time was connected with some HP big shot. Using that leverage is the only way I've ever gotten HP to fix a single thing.
We're blessed with lots of old and failing HP kit which is slowly being swapped out for Supermicro stuff so every time something goes pop, they get on the phone and screw the warranty as hard as possible then sell the warranty bits as new on ebay and scrap the chassis.
This is our operations team's way of issuing karma for years of pain if that's any consolation :)
I doubt you'd get a different answer with anyone else. Screen cracks are always considered damage. Users lie so unfortunately in the very rare case like yours you get screwed.
I have an audio-drivers-die-on-sleep issue in Windows that they claim they have a patch for but it doesn't work. They didn't design in a brightness control that was able to turn the laptop screen entirely off and Windows can't compensate without 2 (!) pieces of 3rd party software and a line of glue code to get them to talk to each other. The trackpad is horrible and interacts poorly with Windows 8 (menus popping open uninvited). Sometimes the computer boots without the ability to recognize USB, although rebooting has always fixed this issue.
I'm not sure whether or not this all falls under your definition of "support," but it was enough to send me back to the macbook that the dell was supposed to replace.
Also, this was 3 years ago. Maybe they've gotten better.
I've had the same Dell for the past 5 years, an XPS 17. I've had a few problems with it:
- dead hard drives (after 3.75 and 4.5 years) which I don't find too bad, as they have both been used heavily.
- dead power circuit board
- another internal board where some things got desoldered as it had a bout of high fever for a while
For all of these I had the next day on site support, and a tech came over and fixed stuff every time with no problems. Now that I'm switching to a MacBook, I'm actually kinda sad to be potentially parting with the computer while it's getting fixed.
I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon on the way. Ordered it last week with upgraded screen (without touch)/processor/ram. It'll be more pricey than the xps 13.
I've heard everything just works for Ubuntu on the machine. I was planning to run linux in a VM first to see how usable it is then go native if I must.
This must be karma for bitching about Apple, but I just opened the lid of my XPS13 and it has a crack in it. I cannot believe it. It feels like groundhog day!
In any case, I shall report back on how they handle it. Fired off a twitter message to @DellCares and they asked me for the service tag. Go on Dell, impress me!
A few years ago I spilled water on my dell inspiron and wouldn't turn on. I took it to the local dell distributor and they replaced the motherboard no questions asked.
Called them and had an endless loop of
- "I think this is a manufacturing fault"
- "Cracks in the screen are ALWAYS accidental damage and not covered under warranty"
- "But I didn't have an accident with it, so ..."
- "Cracks in the screen are ALWAYS accidental damage and not covered under warranty"
... and so on and so on.
Now, after the most recent graphics board meltdown I am on an XPS13 with Ubuntu, and I can honestly say that apple are off my shopping list for good.