Apple Ireland sales/support

RnR

From todays Irish Times:


Puzzled by Apple’s elastic pricing


Poor Annie West has been driven to near distraction by Apple in recent weeks. Her daughter is studying in the Institute of Art and Design in Dún Laoghaire and is “up to her ears in work” and “student-broke”. Not the best time to break her Apple MacBook Pro, then? Annie went to the Apple website and saw refurbished Macs selling for cheaper than new.

“They were being sold by Apple so I assumed all would be well,” she writes. She bought one. “It arrived. It didn’t t work. No power, nothing.” She says customer support tried to help but couldn’t so they agreed to take it back and issue a refund.

“Four days went by and nothing happened so I rang Apple who then told us that collection had never been initiated.” It took another four days for a courier to arrive to collect it. “I don‘t live in the middle of an ice floe,” she writes. The refund took another five days to process after which she rang Apple to complain. She explained that the service was far from what she had come to expect “and after boring the man to tears about it he agreed a goodwill gesture of a €100 discount off the purchase of a new MacBook”.

The order for a new computer was put through. The price quoted was €1,126.51 from Apple’s educational site. While her daughter was doing the order, Annie thought to herself that she had seen MacBookPros cheaper than that.

“So off I went and had a look and sure enough I saw cheaper on other sites. So we called Apple back and pretended to be a new customer. Asked for a quote on the exact same item, educational discount, no bells, no whistles, same as before. Quoted €1,079 by Apple.”

She e-mailed the company again and told the person who had offered her the discount of the price discrepancy. “At which point he sighed a virtual sigh of exasperation and reduced the total yet again. So what we should have been paying was, if my calculations are correct, €979.” Apple then took the full amount out of her bank account, all €1126.51 of it.

“Only when I contacted them yet again did they say ‘oh well, it’s common knowledge that discounts are added after the item is delivered’. News to me. We’re told it will take ‘three or four business days’. Is this normal procedure? And the tin hat: There’s still no sign of the Mac.”

Ranicand

If she was broke why did she not buy a Windows laptop instead of a Mac?:rolleyes:

I love the look of the Macs and so on for my own personal use.

If I needed a computer just to get things done a cheap Windows laptop would do the job.

aidan_walsh

Dear Lord, this is an Irish Times worthy story?

akadesign

In fairness Ranicand if she's studying in Art and Design it would be silly not to as more of than not that's the platform of choice for any design studio.

My experience with Apple support to day has been exceptional. This is nitpicking and is it really worthy of a writeup.

mikemac

How does that story get in a national paper? It's so insignificant even Joe Duffy wouldn't take it.....or maybe he would!

Just from my own experience, the battery on my macbook failed. Went back to 3G where I bought it, they rang Cork for me. Just left the dodgy battery with them and Apple couriered up my new battery the next working day and gave me a free power cable for goodwill

Can't ask for more then that