Macwintel

On the Pluses of Applecare and the Evils of Tekserve

I had previously mentioned that I’ve had bad experiences with Apple QA. Let me tell you a story children, while we wait for the OS hacking gurus to figure out a way to get windows running on the new Macs (yes it is only a matter of time).

Once upon a time Apple released these new notebooks called Titanium Powerbooks. They had this cool titanium exterior but these tiny little hinges where far too much torque was required to move the screens, thus placing too much force on a small point. Back in those days, Apple hadn’t decided to screw over their loyal resellers by opening up their own Apple retail stores and give them better supplies. So the only place you could buy your stuff in the city was a magical fairy tale wonderland called Tekserve. There a friend of mine fished out good money for her new shiny titanium powerbook and an applecare package. Needless to say, the hinges eventually broke. She took it back to Tekserve where they told her it would cost her $1500 to fix and it was not covered by applecare. So she ended up having to buy a new one, and this was not easy for her to afford, but she was in school and in the middle of a final project editing a video, so she had no choice.

A while later, i had need of a powerbook, and since no one could use it, i asked her if i could try hers. I then fixed it (not an easy task since I had to remove the motherb– i mean logic board and every other part of the thing to get to the right parts). When I was done with it, i returned it to her, working, but ugly. I then found someone else who had the exact same problem on craigslist and I bought it from him. He too went to Tekserve and they too told him the $1500 price. So I bought an 867 mhz tiBook for $600. When I was going to buy the replacement hinges, someone told me that the genius bar at the mac store will replace your hinges for free, since enough people have complained about it and it’s become an accepted fault of Apples (though they won’t publicly admit it… they just removed the hinges in the new powerbooks and macbooks). So I took it there, and they replaced not the hinges, but the entire screen and touchpad assembly. They eventually replaced the logic board too for battery reasons, so I essentially got a new powerbook with an old processor for $600. Eventually, I had work to do however, so I gave the powebook to a Swiss friend of mine who was a student filmmaker and I got a thinkpad.

There are many morals in this story.

• Be careful of buying the first revision of anything, especially an Apple product.
• If you do buy an Apple product, definitely get Applecare, because the product will have a good resale value for a long time and they really do take care of you - unlike the dirty poor people who can’t afford Applecare. Screw them. NO YOU CAN’T PAY FOR APPLECARE WITH FOODSTAMPS OR CRACK.
• Apple screws over their resellers, but if that reseller is Tekserve, then they deserve it and should go out of business soon. Anyways the Mac store looks cooler, it’s in Soho, and for some reason, it always seems like there are 4 or 5 fashion models there just shopping. And their stairway is made out of glass, so you can hang out under there and umm, admire the architecture.