Service with a snarl

As his tight-fisted friend's new MacBook Pro fails again, MacBiter asks whether Apple has sacrificed customer service in its haste to bring the Intel Macs to market

I may have mentioned Mean Mr Mustard before. In fact, I know I have, but I'm never sure how many people read this column so I have to put it that way. MMM is a pal of mine, a fellow Mac user, and when I tell you he kept an ancient SE/30 going well into the late 1990s, you'll realise that 'mean' is a polite way of putting it.

Since then, he's put his hand in his pocket twice (a dodgy business, since his pockets are full of poisonous spiders whose sole purpose is to dissuade him from spending money). In 1997, he bought a G3 notebook and kept it going well into obsolescence. Of course, it fell over in the end, and earlier this year an eldritch scream that sounded like one of Tolkien's Black Riders treading on a sea- urchin told me, and others within earshot, that MMM had found it necessary to upgrade.

He bought a MacBook Pro, hodded it round to my house, boasted about it and - stop me if you've heard this before - while I was admiring it, it died. A No Boot Situation. It was one week old. MMM took it back to the Apple Store in Regent Street where, decently enough, they immediately swapped it for a new one. He's been using it ever since - for about three months, which is still very much within warranty, even if Apple employs the same lawyers it used in its lawsuit with the Beatles (alive or dead).

Today it keeled over again.

PRESSURE SWAP

I've no way of knowing whether Apple will swap it again so meekly, and I can't ask MMM because at the moment his blood pressure is through the roof and he's talking darkly in terms of thermite bombs and poison-pen campaigns. The problem is he has several big deals p'-nding, one of them allegedly with Microsoft co-founder Paul Alien, and if that makes you laugh I can only say it made me laugh, too.

A good deal to do with this hopeless scam is on his hard disk. I assured him that Apple techies can easily swap hard disks if they give him a second new notebook (in three months), but he's not convinced. He is chewing his nails. He is not a happy man. And he hasn't yet paid the train fare to London. Knowing MMM, that will finish him off.

When he tried to lay his problems on me (man), I told him he was confusing me with someone who gives a f*** and walked away with an insouciant laugh. But I am disturbed. Brand New Flagship Laptop From Company Desperately Keen To Pull Off Successful Migration To New Chip Family Falls Over Plop. Three months later, its replacement Falls Over Plop

This is not how Apple used to do things. Has the company rushed it?

MISSING GIGS

Additional evidence for this comes from reader Jon Brind, who tells me he edits videos for a living. He has just bought a new Mac Pro (the desktop version whose specs I tried to predict last issue, not without some accuracy) and regards it as a fantastic computer. He's not sure how fast it is - in real terms - but is upset by the fact that the 250GB hard disk he specified offers 232.9GB of storage, while the second 500GB drive gives him a mere 465.8GB. How come, he asks, and is this a matter for the Trade Descriptions Act?

I think I can answer this one, Jon, techno-herbert though I am. The drive capacity quoted in the sales literature refers to unformatted space. The fact that drives are unusable unless they have been formatted apparently doesn't contravene the Trade Descriptions Act. It's like the weasel term 'up to...' in advertising. If a gadget guaranteed to work for up to three years falls over after 36 hours you can't do a thing about it, since 'up to three years' includes 36 hours. Hey, still a lot of storage, even for video. Count your blessings.

Jon also mentions that plugging the 500GB external drive into the Mac Pro stops it working. This sounds like what we used to call a 'system clash', and probably means you have to throw the drive away

- unless, by chance, the company that made it still exists and offers updated driver software (which actually downloads and works) on its website.

Where Jon is really cheesed off

- and Jon, forgive me for making such a lot of use of your nice email, but the truth is I was stuck for subject matter until it plopped into my Inbox with a welcome thud - is in the technical help and service he received from Apple. Here are Jon's own words:

"Almost everything Apple told me proved to be incorrect. For example, I was told the computer screen I use for another computer would probably work fine. It did not work at all, so I had to rush out and buy a new display when the Pro arrived, to check that the Pro worked at all.

"The Mac helpline was useless. When I rang up to talk about the

blank screen, they seemed to concentrate on keeping me hanging about on the phone, and eventually issued a return number promising that a delivery service would ring up to arrange for the collection of the computer. More than 24 hours later, I'm still waiting."

CUSTOMER DISSERVICE

He has more to say, particularly about the equally crap website, but I won't exploit the poor guy any further. You get the picture. Fantastic computer, crap service. This is not the way Apple normally does things. In the past, the exquisite design and fab software was accompanied by good build quality and pretty good support.

I don't know if Jon's external hard disk problems are the result of something overlooked by Apple engineers, or whether the guy who slapped the whole thing together'.;.;

the assembly line had just seen his family arrested and was upset as a result. Either way - and the crap service in particular - it all suggests a system that has been 'put in place' (another weasel phrase) so hastily that it is not actually 'fit for purpose' (yet another). One has to feel that in their haste to shake the IBM dust off their boots, Steve and co have paddled their canoe just a little too briskly.

It's been done before. In early 1944, when D-Day was coming, the Austin car and truck company was given an order for three thousand lorries, to carry the supplies necessary to maintain the British armies in the field once they had got ashore. When the trucks were unloaded, they were all found to have faulty pistons, about an inch too wide, and wouldn't run. The Allied advance was set back six months as a result and another three million people died. A duff Mac Pro or MacBook Pro isn't on that scale of horror, of course, but you see what I'm getting at.

NOVEMBER 2006 * COMPUTER SHOPPER