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Dell contracts out the bodies that go onsite to service their warranties. I once did a few of these contracts. When you get onsite you're just supposed to cal

Dell contracts out the bodies that go onsite to service their warranties. I once did a few of these contracts. When you get onsite you're just supposed to call and do everything you're told. You're literally just their eyes and hands. If you try to figure things out on your own you'll just be ignored and if you persist the contract will be canceled and you wont be paid. I was looking at the PC of one of these poor customers, Dell was having me do a couple of power checks. At the end of it they said "we've ordered a new power supply, you'll have it in 2 days". When I hung up the customer says to me "they didn't say power supply did they? This will be the third one. Why doesn't someone actually figure out what's wrong with my computer?" I've never touched a Dell product since that day.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
My friend switched to the Mac mostly because of my example (though I shy away from advocacy) and his iMac had multiple, far more invasive repairs including at least two motherboard replacements. Eventually my Mac expertise helped because I picked up on forums that 3 major repairs was usually enough to argue for a replacement (or similar, the details are hazy with time). A rough introduction, but he's now the proud owner of many, many iPods, multiple iPhones, Airports, iMacs and Macbooks and probably going to get an iPad. I'm sure there are stats available that would reveal exactly who is more likely to sell a defective device rather than rely on anecdotes. What I am happy to offer as an anecdote is that there is clearly a certain kind of Apple purchaser, who even when returning a faulty product(!), will managed to convince themselves that Apple has some magical process that is unavailable to any other company, when generally almost everything they do (excepting the rare flash of brilliance) is fairly bog standard and boring, if not inferior to the competition (e.g. A4 is slightly worse than Samsung's sister chip in it's phones, PPC was in later days much slower than intel except in carefully staged Altivec bake-offs).
- metageek 16y ago
  Yum, Baked Altivec!
- loewenskind 16y ago
  My understanding was that after the second failure you were eligible for a replacement. Apple consistently scores well on customer service. All PC makers are buying from the same place so of course one isn't going to be much better than the other. The difference is in customer service and extras (e.g. that fantastic touchpad on the mac book line).

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

My friend switched to the Mac mostly because of my example (though I shy away from advocacy) and his iMac had multiple, far more invasive repairs including at least two motherboard replacements. Eventually my Mac expertise helped because I picked up on forums that 3 major repairs was usually enough to argue for a replacement (or similar, the details are hazy with time). A rough introduction, but he's now the proud owner of many, many iPods, multiple iPhones, Airports, iMacs and Macbooks and probably going to get an iPad. I'm sure there are stats available that would reveal exactly who is more likely to sell a defective device rather than rely on anecdotes. What I am happy to offer as an anecdote is that there is clearly a certain kind of Apple purchaser, who even when returning a faulty product(!), will managed to convince themselves that Apple has some magical process that is unavailable to any other company, when generally almost everything they do (excepting the rare flash of brilliance) is fairly bog standard and boring, if not inferior to the competition (e.g. A4 is slightly worse than Samsung's sister chip in it's phones, PPC was in later days much slower than intel except in carefully staged Altivec bake-offs).

metageek 16y ago
Yum, Baked Altivec!
loewenskind 16y ago
My understanding was that after the second failure you were eligible for a replacement. Apple consistently scores well on customer service. All PC makers are buying from the same place so of course one isn't going to be much better than the other. The difference is in customer service and extras (e.g. that fantastic touchpad on the mac book line).