Comments on: Steve Jobs doesn’t care about Australians

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:18:27 +0000

From what I’ve heard from friends this sounds just like ordinary tech support to me, although my personal experiences with support haven’t been so bad. Granted, it was twice for the same system, which may indicate it was a shoddy piece of work, but the first time it was ‘yes, the sound card like you thought, it was fried, we had to replace it’ and the second time ‘your monitor is blown, lucky for you we’ve got an almost identical one lying around, we’ll give you that one’. Not bad for a thing I bought at a supermarket somewhere. And even though in the second case the operative word was almost, I had sent it in outside the warranty deadline but wasn’t charged a dime.
So anyway, where I’m going with this… even though my personal experiences have been okay, I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from friends so I do sympathise. And since good tech support does exist, at least we can hope that Apple will eventually offer it in Australia. If not, you could always try to get a consumer protection agency to bug Apple about it.
Also, I sympathise with sticking to something even if something is wrong with it. The finish of my brand-new mouse is peeling off (which is apparently a common problem) but it’s the most solid, ergonomic, well-built mouse I’ve ever laid my hands on, so I don’t dare to call support about it. What if they give me a different one back? And if it’s the same one, it will develop the same condition. Even so, if I had to spend A$800 and a good deal of time to get something fixed, I’d probably buy something new; maybe it’s just me or maybe it’s because I don’t have copious amounts of cash to throw at a wild goose chase.

By: Jaymz

Jaymz — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:25:34 +0000

Oddly enough, the Mac Pro display issue does have a workaround. If you connect two displays to the thing, it works fine. So for now, I have the sucker hooked up to my HDTV to avoid the horrible, horrible crashing. So far, so good.

Plus, I also have an 8800GT that’s just shipped, and the 8800GT is known to not reproduce this sort of shit, so I can now start depending on the thing more and do some serious VM-ing.

By: wild

wild — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:28:07 +0000

This is the part where us PC fanboys would probably start with the “I told you so”s, but I’m not going to do that. Because I’ve been through nearly exactly the same thing with Dell.

We got a Inspiron laptop recently through work, and being a “business” machine, it was ordered with *next day* onsite warranty. Pulled it out of the box, pressed the power button, rubbed my hands together as Vista booted (yeah yeah, I know) - and then, blue screen of death. Memory parity check error. This is quite literally the first time I’ve seen a machine BSOD out of the box. I knew Dells didn’t have the best reputation, but this was kind of a joke.

After a few reboots and a few more blue screens and random Windows crashes, I find out that this is not an uncommon problem with the model. I also find out that this model has a habit of putting anywhere between 50 and 200 volts AC through the screws on the bottom of the chassis. Ah, the power of Google-fu. Sure enough, I tap a multimeter onto the chassis screws and it’s putting out 90 volts. That might have something to do with it!

We asked for a 3-pin power brick rather than the 2-pin ungrounded version that Dell moved to recently, and after explaining it all to the Indian call center drone, I eventually got it elevated and they sent us the 3-pin adapter. The machine still crashed (albeit a little less), so I assumed the stray voltage had killed something. So they said they’d send a tech out the next day. 3 days later, someone shows up from a local PC shop to replace the motherboard. It works for a day or two, then bluescreens again. I call up and demand they replace the system, because it’s obviously fried somewhere. The Indians are adamant that they have to replace the motherboard again.

WHY?! It didn’t work the first time, so here’s a guess: It probably won’t work THE SECOND DAMN TIME.

Sure enough, a different tech from a different shop shows up (and again, with an odd idea of the meaning of next day support) and replaces the motherboard. And again, the thing still doesn’t work. After another angry call to Dell, they agree to send us a new laptop. Which means building it from bloody scratch again in goddamn Malaysia.

And after all this, they send me a “how was our support” questionnaire. Being the honest person I am, I scored their support pretty bloody low. And then some Indian woman has the balls to call up and ask why I wasn’t happy.

By: Metabug

Metabug — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:28:41 +0000

Well that sucks, best of luck to you =\