Successful repair of our first broken MacBook Air, or epic failure of AppleRepair services.
(Story about the second broken unit with similar experience to follow soon.)
Fixed and upgraded the first MacBook Air. Something the incompetent people at #PowerMac Center in Manila were not able to do. We had the machine there twice. They quoted is 37,000 Pesos (US$ 785) for a new logic board because they supposedly found corrosion inside the machine. What was actually wrong was a small piece of metal in the magnetic MacSafe connector preventing contact and thus denying the machine power. It also needed a new battery, it always crashed when the battery had reached 40% charge.
I have an IT/electronics background but I am a busy person so we decided to go for the Certified Apple service provider in Manila, PowerMac Center. After four useless trips to Manila to bring the MacBook there and pick it up again, two times quotation fee paid, the ridiculous quote mentioned above, and stupid replies from PowerMac Service Center customer service to my inquiries I decided to look at the machine myself, found the metal piece, opened the computer to look at the corrosion, found no corrosion inside (why was I not surprised), and then ran the hardware tests, which all turned out fine except for the battery, which had more than 1000 charge cycles and “needed replacing”. We then took the machine to Germany where #GRAVIS, also finding no corrosion inside, changed the battery.
Today an upgrade to El Capitan, yesterday I did a day long test, the machine is just fine.
What frustrates me nowadays is that people get away with this sort of incompetence. How many users get the wrong diagnosis, too high bills, or buy new stuff without need because they are told crap by incompetent service people?
What happened to common sense in problem solving? PowerMac Service Center explained their failure by “..we have to stick to the Apple test procedures, otherwise we loose our certification..” Just following checklists and then blaming Apple for being incompetent? Hello, any brains there? Machine does not get power, so we quote for a logic board replacement? I could train a monkey to do better.
Problem in the Philippines is that there is no effective consumer protection. I reported this case to a consumer protection web site, hopeless.
And because they also sell new machines at PowerMac Center, they probably don’t put much effort in repairs. And provide lousy #AppleService instead.
See also the responses of others in the original Facebook entry: