About 5 weeks ago I wrote about how my gorgeous powerbook had overheated and burned my pregnant fiance Zoe. Well after two months of red tape and quite a bit of runaround between the local Apple store’s “genius” in charge of my problem and the tech support line I finally managed to get a solution that worked out well.
The entire issue started with it overheating enough to cause a small burn on Zoe’s hand. After 3 trips to the apple store and being told “there’s nothing wrong with it”, Apple recalled the batteries of an additional 1.5 million units. I went back to the store and let them know yet again that an injury had taken place and was told to “call tech support” again.
Well knowing full well that I had a planned trip to San Jose I realized that I could just drop by the Apple campus and plunk myself down in the lobby until the issue was resolved. Initially I was put on the phone with someone from the “office of the CEO” named Melissa who said that my only recourse was to call tech support. I gave her my number to have someone call me that day and then went back to the lobby desk and asked for someone to meet with me face to face. About 20 minutes later I was called by Nathan Phillips with Corporate Executive Relations who came straight down to the lobby once he discovered I was still in the building.
I explained the entire story to him and gave him the paperwork and reports I had regarding the initial overheating problem, the response from the Genius bar at my local store as well as showed him the red area on Zoe’s hand (2 months after the burn). He let me know that Apple was not happy with the way I was treated and contrary to protocol took my powebook in order to get in the hands of engineers as quickly as possible.
He let me know that in the event it could be repaired that I would get a new machine. With a quick handshake and a promise to get to the bottom of why an injury claim was processed in an expedited manner we went home.
The next morning around 9am I got a call from Nathan asking if I would mind going through the very lengthy checklist of questions regarding the battery issue and the injury as well as letting me know that it would take Apple’s engineers 2-3 weeks to start examining the unit, so would I be ok with waiting that long to get some sort of resolution. I made sure to tell him that since I hadn’t been able to use the powerbook for two months waiting another month was unacceptable. I said having a working machine as soon as possible would be necessary. He promised to try and figure out a solution and would call me back.
After that call I went back to packing up all of the gifts Zoe received at the baby shower we were in San Jose to attend. About 10:15 in the morning Nathan called yet again to ask if it would be acceptable to get a 17″ machine in lieu of a 15″ macbook pro since I had an 8x superdrive and the 15″ macbooks did not have that feature. I of course said “that would be fine” and after asking a few other questions said he’d call me back.
A few hours later while out at lunch he called to let me know that a 17″ Macbook Pro with all of the options would be waiting for me at the Santa Clara Apple store. I then asked him about getting a new case since my old case liner was for 15″ powerbooks or smaller. He said that it would be unlikely and he was already at the limits of what he could do. I got to the Apple store and identified myself to the manager Ron and he handed me my new Macbook as well as asked if I needed a case to go with it. I said that would be great.
So after all was said and done I did manage to get the issue resolved, Zoe’s hand is fine and I have a brand new $3000 piece of gorgeous dual booting (yay base camp + vista) Macbook Pro as well as a neoprene case to transport it in. Yesterday I received a call from the store manager from the local Apple store to ask me who I dealt with at the store that dropped the ball. I received a very heartfelt apology from her as well as a free year of .Mac service plus Apple Pro Care for a year as well. I’m still waiting though to discover if any data can be recovered from my powerbook and the 2000+ photos in iphoto I hadn’t had a chance to backup once it died.
Thanks to Terry @ the Portland Apple Stores, Nathan Phillips at Apple and the 3 folks at tech support I spoke to. in resolving this, now if you’ll excuse me I have older backups to restore as well as my ipod to connect to the new machine.
Here’s one of the “unboxing” shots I took while opening it:
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