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If You Want Good Support from Apple, Be Prepared to Pay the Price
moviedemon Updated - 5th Feb 2010
You'll notice that there are two vastly different viewpoints being related here with regard to Apple customer service: those who've had a top-notch experience, and those whose experience was utterly abysmal.

The difference? The Apple extended warranty.

If you shell out the cash for the extended warranty, then yeah, they'll treat you very well. If you're covered under standard warranty, they're OK but not always very helpful, but the minute that warranty expires, you might as well be wandering alone in the desert.

I have experienced this first-hand more than once. My first-gen iPod died just a few days after the warranty expired (bad hard drive). I called Apple, and before I could even get the words out of my mouth, the customer service person had already looked me up, determined that I didn't have an extended warranty, and told me that my best option was to spend another $300 on a new iPod. (Meaning that the privilege of owning an iPod was costing me $300 per year.)

This happened even though early iPods had crappy harddrives, and Apple later admitted as much.

A few years later, a friend of mine who was a computer novice asked me to recommend a machine, and I suggested an iMac. He had been saving for a year, and had exactly enough, and couldn't afford the extra warranty.

Again, just a month after his warranty expired, the iMac died (bad power supply). He called Apple and they referred him to a local service center where he found out that the cost of repair would be 80% of the cost of a new iMac!

I felt terrible.I did some research online and found that this particular year/model of iMac had a problem with a bad power supply, and that Apple was doing an "informal recall".

I called Apple to get my friend's iMac repaired, and they told me that even though he had the particular model in question, and even though it was displaying the exact same symptoms as those described in the "recall", his machine's serial number was just outside the range that the recall covered - and there was nothing they could do.

I pleaded with them and pointed out that they were about to lose not just one, but TWO customers for life. I had bought nothing but Macs since my Mac Plus in the late 80s, but this experience had made me sick!

The customer service person hung up, and I made good on my promise. I made a switch to Dell PCs right then and there, and I have never bought another Mac since.

Now, you could say shame on me for not buying the extra warranty, but you know what? I've been buying electronics for 30+ years - I still have that old Mac Plus (and four other Macs that I bought over the years), and it runs like the day it was new. I have a Dell Optiplex sitting in my basement that I converted to a wireless server 4 years ago, and it's never had a single problem.

I've been taking my Dell Inspirion 6400 laptop with me everywhere I go for the past 4 years, and the only thing I ever replaced was the battery.

I take care of my stuff and it tends to last. In my experience, most electronics that are going to fail, do so early on, well before the standard warranty is up. But I firmly believe that Apple sacrifices quality for aesthetics, and I absolutely refuse to pay for an extended warranty on top of the extra 15-20% "trendy tax" that is applied to each and every Apple product!
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