The Apple Care Hoax
Beware of Apple Customer Support – read before buying ANYTHING from Apple!
I’ve held off blogging about this until after I had a chance to speak with someone at Apple personally to get some sort of customer satisfaction. After speaking with a senior support person at Apple, I was basically told that I was a screwed victim of the Apple Care hoax.
If you’re considering switching to Apple under the fanboy myth that they care about their customers more than Company X, please read on. Apple is one of the most controlling and self-serving companies that I’ve ever done business with.
I have been hosting the App Show for almost as long as the App Store has been in existence and have been a self proclaimed iPhone fanboy for years. I bought into the hoax that Apple so elegantly markets to us every day and switched from my primarily Microsoft world to the glossy Apple utopia that was promised to me.
This week, I finally had a need to call upon Apple to honor this promise of customer satisfaction. My wife’s phone suddenly stopped charging after using a charging unit that we had never used on her phone before. Between the time that it was working and the time that it wasn’t, it hadn’t moved more than a few feet.
I took her iPhone 3GS into the Apple Store at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve frequented that store spending thousands of dollars there over the past year or so. I was sure that, considering the volume of business that I did there, someone would help me out.
The guy at the “Genius Bar” took a look at the phone for about 6 seconds with a light and handed it back to me saying that there was water damage and there’s nothing that he can do for me. I was shocked! I told him that this can’t be because it’s never been wet before.
He took another 3 second look at it and noticed some discoloration on the dock leads. He said. “yea, it looks like it has corrosion, too. Sorry, you’ll need to pay the $200 repair fee for this phone”. I quickly changed from shocked to furious! We just bought this phone for $400 only a few months ago!
After seeing my customer record and all that I’ve bought from them, they treated me like a loser that was trying to scam them and sent me on my way empty handed!
I went home and did some research. You can find quite a few links on The App Show episode 47 show notes. It seems that Apple has been screwing over thousands of their loyal customers this way lately! Their policy has been to find any fictitious way possible to void warranties and screw customers like me.
If this is how Apple behaves as the underdog, you can just imagine how they would be if they were ever as large as Microsoft!
I have been working in IT for over a decade and in the computer industry for almost 20 years. I’ve dealt with countless technical support calls and I can tell you that Apple is the worst of them all. They sound friendlier than any other technical support line as they tell you that you’re screwed and “have a nice day”. At least there’s that!