Wow, this is why I'm glad I bought a Mac (excellent customer support!)

Hm, that is interesting, talin...I guess again Apple isn't ready with newly designed hardware...there were similar quality issues with the original Core Duo MBPs.

 

It's the old saying about not buying Rev. A Apple hardware. But...these have user replaceable hard drives, and good warranties, so...

 

I bought the white macbook.
But the reasons you and Sam just stated are why I didn't go for an aluminum macbook this time around.

It's kind of funny though, but now this one is ok, I'm freaked out about ruining it or anything. I make sure I put two fingers between the screen bezel and palmwrest and slowly close the lid to prevent palmwrest cracking. Then, I decided to remove my usb mouse from the macbook port and just put it in my apple keyboard. It required a lot of force (being so new ), and finally it gave and pulled out which kind of freaked me out.

 

Apple Service? To those who've never paid for service and have moved up from a bottom-feeder machine, I'm sure it's great. The retail experience is among the best you can get and I've never had an unpleasant experience at an Apple Store... although one could argue that the frequency of having to be there, which increases exponentially with the number of Apples you own, could be counted as a downer.

To those who're used to actually paying for uplifted service like me however, I can say it's a steaming pile of horse turd in relative terms and the biggest contributor to downtime issues I have, especially given the unreliability of the hardware. It's kind of laughable really that there is no actually Pro support for 'Pro' (not that it is all that much) hardware.

 

I don't know what to think. You always hear that Apple's support is the best though (including in Consumer Reports if I'm remembering right). I know they've come through for a coworker dealing with a GPU issue. Hopefully they'll be fine if I go this route...

 

Perhaps it would be beneficial to describe what you're comparing AppleCare to in your rather severe deprecation, i.e. Dell Business Gold, dedicated IT corporate support, what?

Simply saying AC is poor, but not offering your point of comparison to back that up, leaves an ineffective argument behind....

 

Good point: I'm comparing broadly against Dell Prosupport for end users, and also the consumer support in the XPS lines (without commenting on the hardware - especially the Apple-level QC disaster that was my M1330's). By no means just Dell, but they will be a representative example. I'm also not talking about whether you get an Atlantan or an Indian at the end of the phone, or how smiley the Genius was. I'm talking about actual downtime when there is a problem for paid-for support.

There's also the matter of whether you need it in the first place: Since I haven't had any of my flagship-model Sonys go wrong in the time I've had every single iteration of the Macbook Pro released and made regular use of Applecare, I can't for example comment on whether Sony support sucks - because I've not had reason to call them during that period.

One of the problems is that there's no uplift possible even if you wanted it. While I fully realise that for many Apple users a choice of more than one in any product category can be confusing, it would still be a little more appropriate if you're going to bandy words like 'Pro' around in relation to your gear.