Macs are exp

Saturday, December 22, 2007 by Dave Winer.

When I got back from Europe my black MacBook wouldn't boot, it just sat there with a disk icon and a flashing question mark. So I made an appointment at the Apple store in Emeryville to have it looked at by an Apple person. 

When I got there, there was no wait, they were calling my name. The repair guy opened the Mac, took out the disk, went into the back room, and came back saying the disk was bad, I'd need a new one. How much? $160. How large? 80GB. I've been buying disks lately, I bought a 500GB disk for $150 a few weeks ago, and just bought a 1TB disk for $280. So I knew that $160 for 80GB, even in a portable form factor, was probably a ripoff, but I figured here I am now, I can get the computer working and shrugged it off. 

The new disk went in, I signed a form, and was about to leave and asked for the old disk to take with me and the clerk said it was his not mine. They were going to send it back to the manufacturer. I figured it would be refurbished and sold cheap to someone in a third world country. Little did I suspect.  

So he went and got his supervisor. She came out and insisted that the drive belonged to Apple, even though I had paid an inflated price to buy a new one. She showed me the language on the reverse side of the form I signed. It was even worse than she said. They were allowed to give me a used drive, there was no guarantee that the drive they had just put in my Mac was even new! It might have been someone else's defective drive.  

Now there are a lot of speeches I could give right now. Here are a few. 

1. I buy Macs knowing they're more expensive, but I expect to be treated better. I drive a BMW for the same reason. Luckily there's Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, et al to keep BMW customer service in top form (which it has been so far, I'm on my fourth BMW). 

2. There are consumer protection laws that require auto repair shops to offer to give you the old parts. Why doesn't that apply to computer repairs? Or maybe it does. 

3. Apple prices are ripoffs, but this is an unusually heinous ripoff. To charge such inflated prices for used parts, they should have some shame. 

4. They don't seem to have any fallback when there's a dissatisfied customer. They don't teach their store personnel empathy. I know this because it comes up with both the good and bad experiences at Apple stores. The store personnel feel separated from the company. As an Apple shareholder, I think it would work better if they felt they were guardians of the company's reputation. Consider for a moment that you are ripping off the customer. What tools can you offer the sales person to make good with the customer? Could you let the customers who object take their drives home? Could you offer a discount coupon on the next purchase, or free ApplePro or whatever the premium support service is? That they let me walk out of the store, a person who spends many thousands of dollars with Apple, feeling like I had been abused, says they haven't got all the glitches out of their retail process.  

5. Falling back on the fine print is really lame. I think they should tell you up front, before they do the work, that you're not getting the old drive back. Think about the potential for abuse. What if the data on the drive can be recovered? What if there are credit card numbers and other personal information on the drives? Does Apple really want to treat their customers privacy so shabbily? For what? Don't they already make enough money off the $160 price for the new disk?