Offtopic: Apple Product Quality
This is a bit offtopic - but it has to be said: Apple’s product quality is appalling!
There. Now it’s out. And I am a real fan of Apple, their OS X and design - since the day my dad bought the very first Macintosh available (Mac 128k anyone?).
Why the rant you might ask? Easy - I bought a first generation MacBook Pro about 2.5 years ago (yeah, I know - never buy 1st generation hardware from Apple). After only a few weeks Apple decided to replace the battery - as a couple of units exploded. Fun. So I get my new battery and realize that the machine gets hot, really hot after using it for a few hours. Apple tells me that this is normal. I don’t think so - so I start to discuss this with my local Apple dealer. And we discuss. And Apple still thinks that a notebook which gets so hot that you can’t physically touch certain surface areas without burning yourself is ‘within tolerance’. Funny enough tons of people report the same problems with their units. Suddenly Apple changes their mind about ‘tolerance levels’ and starts to exchange the mainboards of the affected machines. Not that they would inform me about this but I need to find out on a blog. After some back and forth with my Apple dealer (who also wasn’t in the picture yet) they are finally happy to replace the board. Nice - that’s my second repair on a 2.000 Euro ‘business class’ notebook.
After about 18 months I realize that my battery is performing rather poorly - ageing is a problem with batteries but looking at the amount of recharge cycles, it simply doesn’t feel right. Well, well - I guess I need to buy a new battery sometime soon. But Apple wouldn’t be Apple if there isn’t something in the air. With one of their system updates Apple introduced a little fix which sorts out defective batteries and basically renders them useless (battery time goes down to 2 minutes or so). Apple then replaces these defective (and easily to spot) batteries free of charge. Nice idea. But - Apple didn’t tell their dealers about this when they rolled out the software update. You can imagine what happened: I install the update, my battery dies, I go to my dealer and he tries to sell me a new battery. After a lot of back and forth I get him to replace the battery - only to learn that a few days later Apple finally informed my dealer (and the public) about the ‘hidden’ feature in their system update. They simply wanted to get those defective batteries out of peoples computers. Good idea - but probably you tell people beforehand that this is now happening!
Anyway - I now have a new mainboard and my battery was replaced twice. But the saga goes on: With the MacBook Pro Apple introduced a new, magnetic power plug called MagSafe. Great idea, unfortunately they didn’t reinforce the cable around the MagSafe plug so that the cable rips and shows it’s innards after a while. Again: A problem which tons of people have, which is widely reported on the web and where an Apple service rep tells me that I need to buy (!) a new power adapter as they don’t cover this under extended warranty. You can guess what happened: Only a few days ago Apple acknowledged that their power adaptors are faulty and can be replaced free of charge!
And the whole reason why I write this? Well, today I was at the London Apple Store to get a new power plug (repair #4 on my high-end notebook). While waiting for the Apple Genius (not my invention - they actually call themselves Geniuses) I met two other people with 1st generation MacBook Pros. They were both on their 4th and 5th repair.
Unreal.