Service above all....

Now, those of you who know me, know that I love Apples – Both the delicious and nutritious variety as well as the stylish battery operated type.  Don’t get me wrong  - I love my PC even though its been acting up the last few weeks.

One of the reasons that I love the latter is really about the service – I’ve owned Macs for years and I haven't had a horrible experience yet – Now, I’ve had hard drives go out “Damn Fujitsu!!!!” But I have yet to have even a less than excellent experience from Apple.com sales or from the Apple Store - (Fashion Island is my favorite). Since its only 2am and I am waiting on some much needed information from production I’ll let you in on what's happened in the past few weeks....

I used to own a 13” MacBook till I lost a hard drive (as mentioned above) - So, I took the thing into the my local and favorite Apple Store and the nice people back there took it out tested and concluded that it might be dead and we there’s nothing they can do and that I should call a data recovery service – or just swap it out for a new one (now I don’t have a receipt or anything) – They stock Toshiba now (excellent)!!  Fujitsu is just crap.  I told the dude there that I would give the data recovery a try and if it didn’t work out I would come back for an exchange.

So, I couldn’t wait  - I bought a big fat 150gig Toshiba drive threw it in there and sold the thing to my cousin that night – who seems really happy with it by the way.  So about a week later I went back into the Apple store and picked up another MacBook – It was ok and I used it for about a week then took it back because it just felt slow – Now I don’t know why – but it did.  I got a 15” MacBook Pro – You know, cause that’s how I roll....Pro!  (the nice people there were more than happy to accommodate me, mind you without a receipt)  It was a sweet deal for me and my out of pocket was really minimal.  So, a few weeks go by – actually 4 of them and sure enough Apple decides that they want to update the MacBook Pro line with all kings of goodies that I actually want – See, I got the 13” for battery reasons.  These 15” suckers love to be plugged in.  So – needless to say I called the store and they were more than happy to exchange my 4 week old now discontinued MacBook Pro for a brand new LED backlit, Santa Rosa, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT sporting version with 2 gigs of RAM for the same price (that might hopefully run 30 minutes longer).  Now, they could have just told me to “F” off but they didn’t  - they knew that the new one was so much better and that I would be so butt hurt if they didn’t let me exchange it.  So, I roll in there and worked out the exchange (sans receipt) and they were even nice enough to throw in a new iPod.  Not that I need one – Cause, we have like 20 of them. Meanwhile they are totally cool and helpful about the whole thing – Have you ever been to BestBuy or Circuit City?  Its nuts in there and they kinda don’t like you to return things....
Remember that hard drive that I sent off to the data recovery service?  Well it came back -  There was nothing they could do for me and my stuff was lost!  Did I mention that Fujitsu is crap!!!  So, I roll into my favorite store again and find my favorite Genius (who will remain unnamed) and show him the drive – he says, “where's the computer?”  ahhhh.....I sold it  - So, with no more than a few seconds of cajoling he heads into the back (with my now out of warranty opened and loose hard drive) and brings me out a new Toshiba 100 Gig replacement for my dead Fujitsu Crap drive – Just like that!  Easy!

Thanks to Ti’s wiley eBay ways we got a 2.5” SATA hard drive enclosure for .99 cents and I now have a new kick ass thoroughbred notebook that rocks some killer specs and and an external 100 Gig drive that  is going to provide me with years of trouble free service.  This could have gone south several times – Think about it – the first one was shot, the second return was legit but I could have been charged a restocking fee and the third one was way out of the allowed time for a return. Not to mention the hard drive thing at the end of it all -  Wow!! Am I a happy kid!