Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Having great customer service will excuse a multitude of sins
The longer I use Apple products, the more I feel like I don't actually own the equipment, and that Apple wants me to use it according to how they want me to use it, not how I want to use it. But then there are the times when I'm reminded why i use Apple products—the curated experience is wonderful!
I was reminded of this recently. On Saturday, Bunny spilled water on her Mac laptop. Now, all the advice I read said that the first thing you do, before anything else, is to
TURN OFF THE COMPUTER! IMMEDIATELY!
Unfortunately, we didn't know this and thus, the screen on Bunny's laptop went deathly white and it started making this horrible death squeal as Bunny was trying to sop up the water with a towel.
Sigh.
The second thing all the advice I read said was to dry out the laptop by keeping it open, placing it keyboard down on a towel over a milk crate and use a fan to blow air over it to dry it out, and to keep this up for up to 96 hours.
We managed maybe 48 or so before heading off to the Apple Store to see if they could help. Nope. It was dead. So we ended up getting a new Macbook Pro for Bunny. The sad part is, the new Macbook Pro had less memory (8GB) than her now dead Macbook Pro (16GB) and (as it turned out, but I'm getting ahead of myself) a smaller harddrive (128GB vs. 256GB).
We took it home, hooked up the external backup drive (Woot! Backups!), turn on the laptop and waited. That's when we “recalled” her old laptop had a larger harddrive. And at this point, it was a lost cause. The restore procedure stated insufficient storage space and it was a rather painful process to get past this. I tried doing a partial restore, selecting this and that to restore, but it just didn't really work (I suspect the programmers at Apple never really tested a partial restore). God it was painful. I could get nothing restored properly.
So Tuesday we repacked the new laptop back into its box, and headed back to the Apple Store. Now, despite the controlling nature of Apple, they do have fantastic customer service and there was no issue at all at exchanging the laptop we returned for one with a 256GB harddrive. Once back home, we plugged in the backup drive, turned on the computer and waited.
A few hours later, (and all we did was just let it do its thing) everything was back to the way it was before. Other than it being a new laptop, it was like she never dropped water on it. Yes, you pay a premium to use Apple, but sometimes, it's just worth it.
