AppleCare Help Desk actually helpful!

My 3-gen iPod broke and had to be sent back (it turned on, but the internal hold switch was stuck, so I couldn't do anything). Since it was engraved, I expected the fixed (not replaced, and therefore taking aa longer time to have an iPod in my hands, according to the AppleCare warranty), to come in the quoted 2-4 weeks after shipping. I, however, got it back in a week. I was pretty amazed.

My G3 iBook was one of the models that had poor quality of service. First time, it was the monitor cable getting stressed from thge opening and closing of the lid. 2nd time, the video f'ed up. They replaced the mobo, which was nice cause the headphone port was bropken (made from plastic, bad move) 3rd time, the hard drive was about to die. However, AppleCare was not gonna replace the drive unless I could let them listen to the weird sound it was producing (only happpened when it was on for a long long time, and doing something intensive like compiling, or rsync'ing). Finally it died, and they took it. It came back with a new drive and Jaguar (eek!) and the even put in an drive optical drive because the paperclip wasn't working on the previous optical drive. Too bad the new drive's texture clashed with the actual iBook's smooth texture. After that repair, for some strange reason... the iBook kept locking up on me. It coould be because I was unplugging something like my d-link BT adapter or power cable. Took it into an Apple store: Mac Genius: You're iBook has gone in for repair 3 times. Say the magic word, I'll replace with the current model Me: Lemon! The iBook is nice, but I wish the keyboard wasn't so loud (I'm having them look at it today) and I miss regular Airport which was better at picking up faint signals. Oh and having a tray optical drive allowed me to use mini CD's. Oh, and I wanted topay the difference to have BT installed, and apparently that's a factory thing, so too bad on that.

My month-and-a-bit iMac G5 wouldn't start up when I got back to Uni in the week between Christmas and New Year - not a good time for customer service, I assumed. Fortunately I still had my PowerBook G3 so I used Apple's online support chat thingie that they've introduced. This meant that I didn't ring up a phone bill to get the problem diagnosed, so when it turned out that I needed my entire midplane board replacing I should have been able to order it online. For some reason the "order spare parts" webthing didn't work so I did have to call it in - but when I did they successfully accessed my user account and the online chat diagnosis had been registered! So that went much quicker than it could have done. They gave me a "5-7 working days for delivery" quote, but it turned up less than 48 hours later! On New Years Eve! I swapped them over [http://neil.chrisfleming.org/personal/mt/archives/000172.html], checked everything still worked and my data was intact and sent the duff one back. One very happy customer (not so happy that it broke in the first place, but y'know).

Heh, my computer's going back in to AppleCare for two reasons: 1) the right speaker is dead 2) The hard drive beeped when I installed Tiger on my second partition Yes, Apple is going to replace my hard drive because it beeped. That's service.