Zeyus

UPDATE (24 January 2012): I spent about half an hour yesterday in the Apple store. The staff were very friendly but unfortunately, I didn’t get offered anything, no new macbook, not even a replacement while they fix it the next time, not a single tiny bit of compensation for hours of traveling to and from the store (and more to come). I specifically asked them about all this and they said they can’t do anything, hell, even a upgrade to a solid state drive would be something (and awesome). The best they can do is promise me it will be a quicker repair this time, instead of 3 weeks it will take maybe 1 day. That’s better, but not so great. I’ll still be without my laptop for work for that 1 day and I’ve wasted so much time and a bunch of cash on metro trips to and from the store. I’m awaiting their call to say the replacement motherboard is in so I can take my laptop in AGAIN then wait a day and hopefully they’ve fixed it so I can go to the store AGAIN and pick it up finally how it should be. Let’s see! I’m definitely not happy with Apple, AppleCare, Apple Store and their service.

So my laptop started playing up, the keyboard wasn’t working great and for some reason the SD card slot only worked intermittently so if I wanted to get some photos I’d usually end up finding a USB card reader after getting frustrated. You don’t expect this from a top of the line macbook pro, mine is fully upgraded, and I have AppleCare

OK Next step, I call the Apple store in Barcelona (which by the way is nowhere near the center of the city), and they give me a date that I can go and talk with them. My wife and I hopped on the train on the Friday afternoon we both had off from work and spend the 50 minutes or so it took us to get to the Apple store.

We informed one of the staff that we were here and they indicated we should wait on the bench until it was our turn, no problems because we were a little early. Finally we get to speak with a genius, a little later than expected but not too bad, especially considering how busy the place was.

Our guy was friendly and helpful and told us that they would replace the motherboard, the top case and the keyboard. Great, I was really happy with that, and he said it would take about 3 days to get the parts in plus 10 days to repair it…well OK, I use my laptop for my work but I thought I could borrow my wife’s for a week or so. IMPORTANT: I noticed on the guy’s screen that the parts he was ordering said motherboard 2.66 GHz, we mentioned this to him and said that I had the 2.8 GHz version, but he said not to worry because they’re all the same.

Well after 2 weeks we called them and they said still no word. Then a few days later I called again and they said well maybe tomorrow or the next day. OK fine, I checked on the web at almost 3 weeks after we took it in and it said I could go pick it up. So off I go, on the train in my lunch break, spending another half hour to get there. I go into the store and the guy, who was friendly said that it’s not actually ready because they ran some tests and it failed, and they might have to change the motherboard again. He said he was working on it right at that moment and if I could wait around it should be less than an hour. So I did, and it was a little over an hour. A little frustrating, but whatever, I had my laptop back finally! I signed for it and they handed it to me and I went on my way.

Oops:

What happened?? I turned it on and logged in, and checked out the system information just to see if anything had changed (serial number, or anything else to keep track of it). Lo and behold, my laptop’s CPU had been changed to the 2.66 GHz model.

I called the store again and they said that they can’t do anything until I book another date, which I begrudgingly did.

Now I have to wait till Monday to see if they can do something, and hopefully not leave me without my work laptop for another 3 weeks, and maybe if I can get some compensation, this has wasted a lot of time!

I’ll update this post when I find out more. Ugh!