Apple Woes
October 13 2009
Following is the customer experience review I gave Apple after they requested my opinion from my latest repair.
I brought my new Unibody Macbook Pro 13" to the Apple Store Macarthur to be repaired after its optical drive destroyed my Snow Leopard install disc. The Genius I spoke with was extremely nice, and said 3 things would be completed: The optical drive would be replaced. Snow Leopard would be installed, and some case screws that I had lost during a hard drive update would be replaced.
Ten days later I receive my computer back. The case screws were not replaced, Snow Leopard was not installed, and I now my wireless card does not work. I immediately bring it back to the Apple store and am told that it will be another week. I asked to speak with a manager and spoke with NAME OMITTED (the senior genius). NAME OMITTED was extremely unhelpful, going so far as explaining that the wireless card was located inside the screen, and far away from the optical drive, and that this would be a completely new issue, and I would have to wait through the repair queue again for this separate issue, or I could repair it myself. I regrettably left the computer with Apple, once again, to repair.
Eighteen days later I get a call that my computer is finished (for a total of 4 weeks I went with no computer). I arrived at the Apple store to retrieve my computer. I was then told that my computer was in, however, a new issue was found, and it was shipped back to the repair facility. At this point, I asked to speak with a manager.
The manager I spoke with was extremely nice and apologetic. He seemed genuinely sympathetic to my situation, and offered me a new Macbook Pro—which I accepted. I informed him that my MacBook had an upgraded Hard Drive and RAM, and requested to get these back. He obliged, asking that I return my original RAM/HardDrive.
I drove home, got these items, and returned them. When returning I was informed that the repair facility threw away my Hard Drive since it was a non-standard Apple hard drive. The manager was again sympathetic, and explained the situation, and said he’d call the repair facility to try to get it back. He did successfully retrieve my hard drive. However, all of the data on the drive was completely wiped. After putting it in my new Macbook, it auto-booted in as root, and automatically ran several processes that could not be terminated apart from sending a kill -9 signal to the process. Needless to say, this was quite frustrating.
In all, my Apple Support experience has been nothing short of disappointing. The 4 weeks of being without a computer seriously inhibited my ability to complete my schoolwork, and cost me 2 freelance contracts. The time it took to repair my computer is absolutely inexcusable in my eyes. I will definitely think twice about my next Apple purchase.
Ruby Hoedown
September 02 2009
The Ruby Hoedown was this past weekend, and was my first Ruby Conference. It was pretty cool. I didn’t learn so much as I learned what I need to learn more of. And I think that seems to have been the point.
Cucumber and Mongo DB were some popular new buzzwords flying around that seemed to be really cool. Cucumber is a BDD testing DSL that lets you write really descriptive tests that you can show your customers. Mongo DB is a document based database similar to Couch DB, but looks to be a bit more intuitive.
I’ll be using both of these things in upcoming projects. Expect a blog post or two about my experience using them, and perhaps some code examples.