In a previous life, I thought I was lucky when I hadn’t bought AppleCare and the power supply in my iMac G5 1.8 Ghz died one day before the one-year hardware warranty expired. They sent me a new, self-service power supply and I installed it; I bought AppleCare that day even though I didn’t have to. They sold me with their excellent support and coverage.
Recently, I had an even more fortunate thing happen.
Maybe a month before my applecare (three year) warranty was up, I grabbed my MBP and took it over to the couch. I’m sitting there surfing and all of a sudden, zewwwwwp. No warning, it just died. Thankfully I wasn’t in the middle of anything huge, just surfing. I go plug it in and turn it back on and I get this ‘service battery’ warning.
So I call Apple and I ask what’s going on. The Level 1 guy asks his “are you actually an idiot” questions, decides I’m not and escalates my call.
The Level 2 guy asks me to submit a System Profiler report to Apple which gathers data for diagnostics.
During the course of the call, the ‘service battery’ thing goes away before the report is submitted. (Like a frog that will only sing, “Hello, my baby…” when nobody is watching.)
So, the Level 2 tech cannot see that the ‘service battery’ warning was active. (However, they can read my system logs and see that the #$$% thing crashed.) He has me reset the SMC, which is a power manager chip on the motherboard. He also has me power-condition the battery, e.g. charge the battery fully, run the machine on battery until fully drained, and then recharge it again. I figure, these are good things to try, and we’ll see if it happens again.
A few DAYS before Applecare is going to expire I see the stupid message again. I don’t mess around; I resubmit the error report right away before it decides to leave again. But I’m busy and can’t call Apple right then. Or it’s too late at night, or something.
With about two days to spare, I decide I have to get this done before my coverage runs out. I submit another System Profiler report. I call, and get escalated again. This time the Level 2 guy sees the new report, with the error message, and compares it to the one from a month ago. He says, “Wow, it shouldn’t be draining the max capacity of your battery this quickly. So we’ll take these steps:
- We’ll send you a new battery. Send your old one back to us in the same box, return label underneath, etc.
- We’ll send you an empty box. Send your laptop to this place nearby for diagnostics (Austin to Houston, overnight shipping) and we’ll see if something is wrong. Doesn’t matter if it goes beyond the warranty period.
- If you keep having problems that are related to this issue, you can keep calling about it and we’ll support it.”
I backed up the machine (to Time Machine and with SuperDuper), and sent the machine in on a Wednesday. They got it Thursday, turned it around the same day and it came back on Friday morning. Oops; I had gone out of town for the weekend. I had no idea it’d be that fast. So I got it the following Monday.
Even more amazing is what I saw when I opened the box:
- They replaced the motherboard (apparently it was a component soldered on which was malfunctioning and causing it to drain the battery, so they just swap the whole thing)…
- They also replaced the whole bottom case and listed “cosmetic damages” as the reason — when I was biking to work on snow/ice in Chicago maybe a year and a half ago or more, I had flipped over. My MBP was in its protective “MacTruck” secret-agent briefcase, so the corner got dinged instead of killing the laptop. It worked just fine, but DVI cables didn’t go in more than 95% of the way. Whatever. Fixed…
- Even more exciting: they replaced the keyboard! I’ve typed so much on this keyboard, particularly with the keys you use to navigate through PINE (text based email via Terminal) that I had worn through many of the keys’ letters and parts of the palmrests. All replaced.
Therefore: Apple == phenomenal customer support. I am so happy about this.