March 20, 2006MacServiceLast week, my PowerBook G4 hard drive starts to die - making a grinding noise and running very slowly. What to do? Not really looking forward to waiting in line at the local Apple Store, I fill out a form on MacService for service-by-internet. A couple days later, a brown shipping box shows up on my doorstep. It contains exact 12" PowerBook G4-shaped foam and a DHL EZ-return phone number. I drop in the laptop, call the number, and the box vanishes before lunchtime. A few days later, the same box shows up again on my doorstep with a shiny new fast and quiet 120GB hard drive installed, with my old (much smaller) hard drive contents cloned on it. I open the box, plug it in, and here we are now, blogging away. Service, shipping, and a perfect piece of packing foam all for $345. Sure, I could have bought the 2.5 inch 120GB Seagate drive all by itself for quite a bit less. But my gosh, I think I spent less than 15 minutes total on getting this one replaced. In my pajamas. I am very happy with MacService! Also: Apparently, I'm not the only one who dreads waiting in line at the Apple Store. Roger Weber gtalked me and blogged about waiting more than an hour to get his iPod replaced. Apple Stores are run like busy restaurants. Business is good, so waiting in line is part of the game. Posted by David at March 20, 2006 10:10 PMComments
Interesting. I recently went through a very similar process with AppleCare, and I have to say I'm much less pleased. My first thought was to go to the Apple Store and just drop it off. Big mistake. "You have to wait 90 minutes to talk to a Genius." No thanks. So, I just had them deliver the shipping box to me. Shipping went smoothly enough, but they only fixed the fried logic board - the hard drive 'seemed to work fine for us' and so they deemed it not worth replacing. Spent an hour (literally) on the phone begging various support techs for a replacement. The drive really was dying. Had another box shipped out. Included a note again begging for a new drive, which they gave me this time. Don't think I'm going to buy AppleCare for my Intel PB - MacService sounds a lot simpler. Post a comment
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