Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Three Cheers for Applecare

...or the saga of the trouble-prone iMac. The story begins in July 2008 with the purchase of a shiny new 24" iMac with the what was at the time the top of the line 3.06GHz dual core processor. Cool machine, fast, beautiful screen, one very happy user. Three months later it is back to the Apple store with a total failure of the hard drive. The drive was replaced under warranty and I found my backups had not been working for at least the last two and a half months.

Eventually recovered all the critical data and every thing worked fine until late October of 2010 when it began to get flakey when rebooting. Just before Thanksgiving it refused to boot. After exhausting every thing I could think of it was off the the Genius Desk. The Genius ran every test he could think of and said, "I can't tell if it is the power supply, video card or logic board. So we are going to replace all three and by-the-way since you have Applecare the repairs are free." $1,450 worth of replacement parts later my errant iMac is back home and woking like a champ.

Fast forward a month to Christmas eve when a hard hang occurs. Attempted a reboot, the the iMac chimes, the pinwheel spins － it seems like forever － the pinwheel stops but lots of activity is still being heard from the hard drive. After several minutes the activity stops and the screen goes black. Once again I go through every diagnostic and test I can think of including single user boot, booting from a clean hard drive, booting from a clone of the internal hard drive, booting from a CD all produce exactly the same results. (Forgot to mention plugged in a wired keyboard and mouse because the iMac now refuses to recognize the wireless variety.) Open the Apple Store app on my iPhone and get the first available appointment at the Genius Desk at 6:30 PM on the December 28.

Haul my recalcitrant iMac through the rain to the door of the Apple Store, explain the situation to the Genius who proceeds to try all the various boot systems. The genius actually gets a little further all the way to the multi lingual crash screen but no further.There is a brief consultation with a manager and a brand shiny new basic model iMac in an unopened box is offered in exchange for my 2½ year old DOA machine. I allow as how I am a happy customer, when the "Specialist" says, "This isn't right" and disappears only to re-appear with another unopened box containing a top-of-the-line quad core iMac. "You bought the top-of-the-line so we are replacing it with the top-of-the-line" was the explanation. When I offered to buy Applecare for the new iMac I was informed that full Applecare was included at no charge.

Now that, boys and girls, is what I call Customer Service!

Wow! Beyond !!!

Apple gave me a brand new iBook a few years back...bottom of the line for bottom of the line, but I had to buy AppleCare...NO complaints.

(In an similar, but lesser, instance of treating the customer right, when my friend's HD died out of warrantee the Genius told him where to get it replaced for less than Apple would charge.)

Great story. Sometimes a lemon slips through the cracks. [cold solder joint, hairline crack in the printed circuitry, a flakey component that needs just the "right" conditions to fail, etc., etc. -- nearly impossible to troubleshoot, without (maybe) a signature analyzer and hours of time.]

Apple can easily afford to do the right thing... and it's always good to hear when they do.

[i had a similar experience with an iPod touch, which --like all my equipment --i had "babied" from day one. I.e., they replaced it free despite being one year *past* the warranty period. It did take a tad of polite persistence on my part... and then i think the genius dude probably peeked at my purchase history, and realized i wasn't just trying to weasel a free iPod out of them.]

Apple replaced my leaky liquid-cooled G5 two years ago. It was four years old at the time, so out of warranty even if I'd had AppleCare on it (which I didn't) and they gave me a new single processor 2.8GHz quad core Mac Pro. I could have upgraded to the dual processor one for $500, but since I don't do video, decided I'd rather spend that money on after market RAM upgrades etc. I did have to do a little bit of negotiating to get the new machine, but not much. (Pointed out the safety issues - sure, they were going to fix everything, but what if it leaked again - and at least one person with a leaky G5 had experienced the power supply bursting into flames because of the leak. Also, they were backordered on replacement processors at the time and it was my primary work machine...)

I was a very happy camper.

mike: almost certainly video card. ran into that repeatedly here on that model. Normally the video card is one of the last things you'd suspect in a machine that didn't want to turn on, but in that case, it was a common problem. (power supply and logic board usually are higher on the list)

Note that taking it to an AASP rather than an Apple Store will not likely get you the "triple replacement" because Apple penalizes anyone but their own stores for "stuffing the turkey" with parts to fix a problem.

Yeah, I suspected the video card in the first place and I am not surprised that AASPs might not have the latitude a company store has. But that is still first class customer service and part of the reason Apple reigns supreme in customer service ratings -- even from Consumer Reports.