Yes, it’s time again for another heartwarming tale of broken Macs, ineffective customer service, and Steve Jobs’s personal email. This week’s installment is brought to you by consumer activism blog par excellence, The Consumerist, who relates the woeful story of J. J, a IT manager at MIT, bought a MacBook, which ended up having some serious issues that necessitated multiple repairs. Frustrated, he called Apple Care and tried to have the laptop replaced, but the process somehow got stalled.
So J did what many of us have yearned to: he sent a letter to sjobs@apple.com calmly and thoroughly detailing the problems he encountered, even tossing in a couple of gems, such as his still working Apple II:
I just want to make this one comparison: Apple II; 30 years old, still works. Macbook; failed within months, could not be repaired even under Applecare, customer waited a month for unresolved “service”.Zing. They don’t make ‘em like they used to, indeed.
Whether or not the fact that J also suggested he might advise against Apple purchases for MIT had any effect is impossible to determine, but something worked on Steverino, for the day after the letter was sent, J was contacted by Jobs’s personal assistant, and the day after that, J had a new laptop and his old hard drive, so he could retrieve the data (now that is virtually unprecedented).
Obviously, not all tales of this ilk end quite so happily. We hope (and imagine that Jobs too hopes) that it doesn’t take a personal email to the CEO to have such issues resolved. Frankly, MacUser would like to see an open letter from Steve on the state of the company’s support and service division, explaining its oftentimes byzantine and seemingly capricious policies and promising a more open, forgiving system in the future. But hey, that’s just us.
Wouldn't it be cool if Steve could take his more than half a billion dollar income and beef up customer service?