Geekend: Apple, Your Iceberg Approacheth

Update below

Apple, Inc. (nee Apple Computer, Inc.) has long led the field in consumer PC hardware for customer support, kind of in the way that Jon Stewart has bested the entire mainstream media for reliability in reporting: Apple generally builds quality products with a piercing focus and elegant design. Considering only computers, the majority of the spread between Apple and other PC makers respecting customer service can be accounted for by the operating system. It is far easier to support a safe, reliable, and cool product like Mac OS X than a jungle of danger and flightiness such as XP or Vista. Nevertheless, I suspect that the Apple customer service Titanic is approaching its iceberg, and I have some personal experience to relate on that point. First, a little background.

Back in 2004, when I was working in QA (“Quality Assurance,” better known as software testing) for insurance monster AIG, I talked the VP of my department into buying the company’s first Macs. I argued that Apple had released its first web browser, Safari, and that thanks to Apple’s new OS (which at the time had reached 10.3, “Panther,” to my mind the first truly stable and functional version of OS X), the Mac’s market share was nosing upward. This was still in Apple’s Power PC era, before they switched to Intel processors in their hardware. Yet I felt strongly enough about their market position and the quality of their consumer products that I was able to get a single machine, an eMac, set up in the testing lab. It turned out to be a good move because less than two years later, the Intel era dawned with a bang in Cupertino, and the rest is recent history.

I also owned an iMac, one of the old dome models, at home, and I was as much an advocate of the Mac (yeah, you could have called me a “fanboi”) as was possible. They made quality hardware which married elegance of design and technical functionality, and delivered it with an operating system that was safe, stable, fun to use, and eminently sensible. And when something went wrong, help was a phone call away. Wait times averaged about five to ten minutes, and when you got through, the person at the other end gave you the feeling that they were there to fix your problem and get you back up and running ASAP.

That, as I recently discovered, has all changed. A little over a year ago, I bought a top-of-the-line machine, a $2,500 MacBook Pro, and spent a month with it, wondering at the amazing design and the sheer speed of the thing. Then, I gave it to my teenage daughter for Christmas. By springtime, though, I was hearing about problems: the machine would lock up, the OS would crash, data would be lost, and Internet connections disrupted. I took the machine into a “Genius Bar” and, two weeks later, found out they had replaced the logic board (for you out there in PC land, this is the Apple version of the motherboard), the entire display, the airport (wifi) card, hard drive, and battery. “Why not just replace the machine with a new one,” I asked the tech, “you’ve basically rebuilt the thing.” My answer was that a rebuild is as good as a new machine and that’s what the warranty covered in light of the defects presented.

The kid had more trouble with the machine in early summer, which turned out to be another hard drive defect. This time, the Apple tech’s first response was to blame the customer: the kid had downloaded and installed Limewire, a popular P2P file sharing client, which the Apple tech said was notorious for messing up its hard drives. It seemed a strange response to make to a simple problem, but I have no experience with P2P clients (don’t use the stuff myself), so I accepted the possibility that it may have been a “user issue,” as they call it. The problem was fixed, Limewire was removed, and that was that.

The next problem occurred in the autumn, when the airport card again lost not merely its connection but its presence within the OS — the OS would simply fail to see that a card was there. Back to the Genius Bar. This time, the tech’s response was first to doubt the existence of the problem. Once I was able to demonstrate it, he rebooted the machine and blamed me for installing a boot loader (the machine was running Windows in a Boot Camp partition and I used the reFit bootloader as the front end). This time, I realized the guy had crossed a line: I explained to him that a bootloader doesn’t load into ROM but onto a zero sector of the hard drive, so there is no justification for making a connection between a bootloader’s presence and a wifi failure. Seeing that I knew what I was talking about, he retreated. The problem turned out to be a crack in the display hinge (thus a disruption to the circuitry running through it), which had to be repaired and reattached. I was starting to worry about Apple’s attitude toward customer service, which to me was as unexpected as it was unpleasant.

Most recently, the same machine started misbehaving again in November — overheating, OS crashing, and more connectivity issues — and off I went again. Again, I was met with doubt and suspicion; this time, though, I and my daughter had taken screen captures that demonstrated some of the problems. Still, I had to argue with customer service reps who told me that event logs and automated testing had revealed no problems. I actually asked one guy if he had laid hands on the machine, really used it instead of merely connecting it to a stress analyzer. Then I pointed out the history of the machine and concluded, “I’ve spent $2,500 that I’d give my eyeteeth to have back right now and you people gave me back a refurb that continues to fail.” I insisted that they spend time with the box and really troubleshoot it. Two weeks later, the machine came back with a new airport card and antenna, new fans, and yet another repair to the display hinge. They had also formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the OS.

Now the machine’s acting up again and I’m ready to shove it up somebody’s ass. Time was when Apple would have looked at a system with a dead logic board, broken display, and other failures of key internal components and said, here’s a new machine with our apologies. Time was when Apple would not have taught its technicians and CSRs to openly and pointedly blame the user and deal with customers with open suspicion. Now, it appears, they are.

The weird but admirably intimate connection that once existed between this company and its customers appears to be breaking down, right at the front lines of customer service. The statistics may appear to show that Apple is maintaining its comfortable lead in customer support over its PC rivals, but what I and other Apple customers are seeing tells a different story. And if the last few years of our world economy have shown us anything, it’s that statistics do not tell the entire picture. If, for example, Windows 7 is as good as I’m hearing it is, then you will see the customer support gap between Apple and the PC-making crowd narrow considerably over the next few years. In any event, my next computer hardware purchase will be a cheap, sub-$500 PC that I’ll load up with Linux (by the time I can afford one, Google’s Chrome OS might be out).

Granted, Apple’s hardware has always cost more than PC hardware; and I’ve never had a problem with that till now. The reasons for this: (a) the Mac was a better machine; (b) with a better and safer OS; and (c) it came with truly supportive customer support. When you spent two grand or more for a Mac, you knew that your high end purchase would be supported by high-end service, whenever it was necessary. That has all changed, and for the worse; and it’s going to catch up to the Cupertino Empire sooner or later.
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UPDATE, 12/7: I actually got to an acceptable solution this morning with Apple. I used the company’s “expert support” line to get through to a manager-level geek. I spent nearly an hour on the phone with him, relating to him geek-to-geek on the history of the machine’s problems, and he agreed to go over the records and speak with the Genius Bar folks who had been involved. He called back a little later and said he’d decided to order that the MBP be replaced, and told me I could do it in-store today. So I’ll be going into NYC this evening to do the exchange and bring home a new MBP, with the only unpleasant condition being that there’s no fresh warranty on it, only the 90 days allowed for coverage of repairs. Nevertheless, it’s an acceptable solution, though the point I made above still applies: Apple should have seen this as the right solution back in April when they rebuilt the machine instead. It should also go without saying that a customer should not have to be a propellor-head to get satisfaction from a tech company. That said, however, Apple has finally done the right thing here.