I have become something of an Apple convert of late making the switch (at home at least) from PC to Mac. This has also extended to my mobile devices, as has been well documented here. Funnily enough Apple have been great during the buying cycle for all my “i” products but recently I have had issues that meant I had to go in for technical help which showed this particular Apple store in a different light.
The first issue surrounded my iPhone 4S which the battery life was severely shortened by upgrading to iOS5.1. To be fair to the Apple Store they did replace the device but the issue is still the same so my advice to those thinking of upgrading – don’t.
The other problem was with a month old iMac which was having problems connecting to my router so I took it back into the store where they retained it to do some tests saying that someone would call me back within 48 hours to tell me what they intended to do.
A week passed with no call so I called them to be told “oh! we were just about to call you!”. Yeah, a likely story. However, the iMac was ready but they weren’t able to tell me what had been done. So I said I would come into collect immediately.
When I reached the store I was then told that I needed photo ID to collect the machine. While that makes sense I protested that I should have been told that when I called half an hour earlier, which elicited the response “well it does say so on the repair paper work” to which I reminded her that “it also says that you will call within 48 hours, but you didn’t”. At which point they relented and went to fetch my machine.
At first no-one seemed to know what had been done to the machine over the previous week but I persisted and someone else was brought down who while hadn’t worked on my machine did have a yellow sticky with some briefly written notes.
I came away with a feeling that I haven’t had before from an Apple Store – a feeling of being unloved and it really didn’t feel good.