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by kolbe 2547 days ago
Apple really is good about taking care of problems. It's easy to complain about the price, but when my Samsung screen stopped working, I had to buy a new phone. When my iPhone screen started glitching, I got it fixed for free in less than two hours. Things like that make paying the "Apple premium" a little more palatable.
2 comments

Unless your product is affected by an issue they decided to never recognize, which in that case you can merrily go fuck yourself because Apple won't lift a finger. Happened to me with an old iMac that developed dust smudges inside the LCD panel due to faulty sealing of the screen.
I owned an Apple Watch for about 2 months before the screen separated from the watch body. The front-line service rep didn’t know what to do about it and took it into the back to show a store manager, who decided it was impact damage and thus not covered by warranty; a fix would have cost something like 70% of the list price for the watch.

Instead of the repair, I bought a $20 Timex that’s served me faithfully ever since.

FWIW, I had the watch face separating issue as well. I had mine replaced at Best Buy (well, not actually replaced there, but they were who I dealt with). You should call back and see if you can get yours replaced. It was a well known flaw.
Too late now; it was over a year ago and in another country; Didn’t bother keeping the dead watch when I moved. I also had enough time with it to discover that I, personally, didn’t get much value out of the “smart” features.

This happened during a hurricane evacuation and I went to an Apple store several states away while waiting for the airport at home to reopen so I could find out if there had been any damage (fortunately not). Of all the people I dealt with during that experience, Apple’s employees were uniquely unsympathetic to my situation, and I decided I didn’t want anything to do with them ever again.

The proximate cause was probably an impact as I treated it like the sports watch it was advertised to be. The separation wasn’t a failure of the glue, but a crack that traveled around the weak part of the glass where it is curved downwards to meet the bezel. There was a tiny nick that was the nucleus of the fracture that could have been caused by anything (in my case, probably some clay on a tennis ball).

The biggest issue for me was that I didn’t want to have to baby something that fragile, especially when it’s supposed to be a fitness object. And the completely professional, but uncaring and robotic, way their representatives handled the situation.

We had a similar experience with my wife’s iPhone 5s, which she has held onto for ages because she loves the small size.

The screen developed a glitch where a few rows of pixels were inverted. We went to the Apple store to see if the screen could be fixed, and they found and gave her an identical new unit for no charge. “This way you’re also getting a fresh battery and everything will last longer.” They hooked up the old phone to the new phone and has everything copied over, we were out in less than an hour with “her phone” made brand new for free.

This was after the 5s was no longer on sale in the US. Maybe we just got lucky and they had some leftover inventory, I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, I felt that was impressively good customer service.

I’ve had consistently good experiences with the Apple store support across 3 countries (over two continents) and it’s the main reason I still buy apple products, specifically iPhones, despite them going down a path I don’t like for the last 4 years.

Apple of 2015 was, really, at the top of the game, I wish I had bought a 2015 retina MacBook when it was new. :(