One Un-Apple-y Customer.

January 17th, 2008.

Myself and my oldest brother goto Glasgow's Buchanan Street Apple store. We purchase two Black Macbooks. We are very happy with our purchases, and take great care of these machines.

Fastforward less than two months.

There's a crack on my screen, which seems to have come from nowhere. I'm more than confused. I haven't dropped my Macbook once since getting it, I haven't thrown anything on top of it - in fact, I've done nothing that should illicit any form of damage to it!

So, I decided I'd phone Apple, seeing as I'd bought the 3-year Applecare Plan, and happily take it back to the store to get fixed. The conversation basically went like this:

Michelle: Hi, this is Michelle speaking, can I take your name?
Roo: It's Andrew ... I was just wondering if I could get some -
M: And can you give me the serial number for your product, please? (- interrupting's still considered rude, right?)
R: Certainly, it's ...
M: I'm sorry, could you repeat that?
R: It's ...
M: Is your product registered to anyone else?
R: Err, No. It's under my name. Anyway, I'm really only needing -
M: Hmm, can you give me the serial number again? I might've put it in wrong.
R: ... Honestly, I'm just needing to know about a repair
M: Well, I'm afraid that we can't actually offer any advice without knowing who the product belongs to, and that involves knowing the serial number.
R: OK... It's *slowly* ... ... ... ...
M: Okay, that's great - Now, how can I help you?
R: Basically, my macbook's managed to obtain a crack in the screen, there's absolutely no explanation for it - I literally closed it one night, opened it the next morning and there was a crack on the screen.
M: Mhm, that's accidental damage.
R: Aye, but my question was actually -
M: No, but we won't cover that, even if you have the 3 year Applecare plan, because as I say, it is accidental damage.
R: Err... There was *no* accident. It literally happened without anything touching the macbook.
M: Well, if you were to send it in for repairs, they would conclude that it was accidental damage, and you would have to pay for the repair yourself.
R: And how much are we talking? - (Bear in mind, I was looking for a *rough* estimate here...)
M: Well, I really don't know, we don't actually deal with the repairs here.
R: Okay, a sorta ballpark figure?
M: Well, generally, as with most repairs to Apple products, it will cost you roughly half of the cost of the machine.
R: ... Eh?
M: Now, if you have Applecare, would you like to register this product?
R: No, thanks.


Needless to say, I near enough shat a lung. I'm gonna have to shell out upto £500 because of a crack in the screen that no-one caused?

And, it gets better... I decided to try and use their online support for it. Took a while loading up, so I decided to google the words "Macbook Screen Crack". Enter hundreds of blogs, all telling the exact same story as my own, with each one having hundreds of comments from other users, also telling THEIR story of how their macbook cracked for no reason, and Apple decided to let them know it wasn't covered by their EXPENSIVE warranty.

It's clearly a design fault. It's clearly crap. I'll be going through to the Apple store sometime this week, to seek out advice, or if need be, VENGEANCE.


And to think... I claimed Windows was made by MicroSHAFT. I was wrong. I am but a humble servant. ='(