11 months ago, I bought a 15" MacBook Pro and paid $2600. The hard drive crashed, and I took it to the Genius at the Apple Store. I was told it was a defective hard drive and they would fully replace it but that we would have to pay $99 to have the data transferred. When I asked for a manager and told her it was not fair to charge me since their product was defective, she justified the charge because "everything has to break sometime." Her name was Christi ** at the Apple Store in Tampa, FL. I was forced to pay $99, so they could retrieve my son's data for college. Scam!
Consumer Complaints & Reviews
On Saturday, November 28th, my white Mac book ceased to work. It started to display a white screen with a question mark. Some googling lead me to this: http://www.apple.com/support/macbook/hd/repairextension/ I made an appointment at the "genius bar" at the Apple Store in the Galleria Mall (Fort Lauderdale, FL) upon arrival my machine was inspected, and the Genius told me that yes, it was one of the units affected. However, it was 2 months out of warranty, so they couldn't honor the repair extension. Now, a friend of mine's mother had the same Mac book model, same issue, over a year out of warranty and they replaced the hard drive and the casing for free.
She was the one who had urged me to go to the Genius Bar to begin with. They wanted $170 just to replace the hard drive (which is known to fail, as evidenced by their own website) and made no offer of attempted data recovery. According to the website, Apple has the ability to provide repair extensions. I was so upset I forgot to ask how one would qualify for a magical repair extension. So, I think it's bogus that Apple put a time limit on the replacement of their (admittedly faulty) product, and I also find it unfair that they get to pick and choose who they help. Why someone else, but not me?
I have a computer that is about two years old- an Imac. The screen got grey and I have applecare and called them- they could not diagnose problem. I had to take it in to the mac store for service. They could not diagnose it and so I left it there.
THe hard drive is broken- they called and told me they could not retrieve my information but that they would give me the hard drive and some referrals for experts to do this for a fee of four hundred dollars just to look at the hard drive and up to fifteen hundred dollars to retrieve information lost.
In the meantime they will not repair my computer until I have given them their broken hard drive.
Now, if I chose to let all my information go and not attempt to save any of it- my computer would be fixed and available to me asap.
I will NEVER get a mac again. When it is fixed- I am selling it right away and getting a PC.
I could have a nice PC for the cost of extracting my information from the crappy hard drive Apple sold me in the first place. This is criminal.
Earlier this year I purchased two Imacs with Apple Care, an I phone, etc. After establishing over the phone with an Apple Support Specialist that the hard drive in one of the machines was defective, the only solution was to lug the machine to an Apple store only to find that if Apple replaced the drive, they would not send the defective drive back to me so that I could recover my data.If I have the hard drive repaired by Apple, they will not send the damaged drive back to me so that I can recover the data. I will never purchase another Apple product!
