Apple service is atrocious. Don't they make you book an appointment and turn up at their store just to get someone to look at it? I hear of people who spend more time taking their laptops to the local Apple store than most people with major illnesses spend going to the doctor...
I bought a Dell XPS13 laptop recently which unfortunately had a non functioning motherboard. I contacted Dell and a technician came to my house first thing the next day and replaced it, no questions asked. Totally hassle free. I'd take that any day over having to book an appointment to see a 'Genius'.
> Apple service is atrocious. Don't they make you book an appointment and turn up at their store just to get someone to look at it?
I had a macbook pro with a logic board that died. I phoned Apple, they couriered me a replacement device next day, and that courier picked up my old device. Literally couldn't ask for better service.
Seriously? My friend was forced to drag his 27 inch iMac into the Woodfield shopping mall location, which if you've ever been there, is a quarter mile minimum walk from the parking lot to the store.
Pedantry. They didn't give him an option besides physically bringing it into the store.
Good question about accessibility. I have no idea. But it's not as though our society is a perfect utopia for the disabled. I can only imagine it would have gone far worse.
I was just thinking reading the comment that you replied to that this goes one of two ways. Some people seem to get wonderful service, others crap for relatively high price.
To be fair, we experimented with a Dell XPS 13 laptop that had a succession of problems, and the service was the worst I have ever encountered in IT, taking several months of elapsed time before we finally got an on-site visit from someone who knew what they were doing (who then fixed the laptop in under an hour). That was what "next day" level support actually looked like in our case.
We were attracted to these as there was a Linux version that potentially offered a good alternative to Windows 10 for some of our people, but the experience was so bad that instead we immediately ruled Dell out as a supplier for any serious equipment for the foreseeable future.
I think we just got stuck in endless loops of tier 1 support people trying to run through checklists over the phone and then again via email. It was essentially the business class version of "Have you tried switching it off and on again?" repeated seemingly endlessly, bouncing from one support tech to another. Clearly several of the techs didn't even understand that they also sold these laptops with Linux on them and that's what we had.
Eventually, literally months later, someone finally seemed to escalate it to a person with the authority to send out a technician, who as mentioned before then fixed the actual problem in barely any time at all. We were on the point of just writing off the machine by then, as the amount of time we were wasting dealing with Dell was in danger of costing more than just buying a new box, and at least we would been reasonably confident of having a working system the next day in that case!
> Apple service is atrocious. Don't they make you book an appointment and turn up at their store just to get someone to look at it?
I can't speak for anyone else, but the last time I had trouble with my MacBook (five years or more ago now, the touchpad had cracked, IIRC), I made an appointment in the morning to come in in the afternoon. Walked up, explained the problem, gave them the machine, and they called me back to pick it up a few hours later. That's not bad, IMO.
Home service is awesome, but unless things have changed recently, I don't think that's common. It also may be different for wear-and-tear fixes vs. DOA replacements; Dell has a strong interest in fixing the latter as quickly as possible to protect their reputation. Most companies, most of the time, expect you to come to them to get service.
They also will ship you a box and ship it to a service center, I've been shocked on the turnaround time on that even with major service. From Me getting the box to getting the laptop back it was just two days (I ship on day one, they get it overnight on day two, they ship back out with a new Logic Board and cables, then I get it on day three.)
I bought a Dell XPS13 laptop recently which unfortunately had a non functioning motherboard. I contacted Dell and a technician came to my house first thing the next day and replaced it, no questions asked. Totally hassle free. I'd take that any day over having to book an appointment to see a 'Genius'.