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Macbook pro warranty

August 20, 2007 on 4:53 pm | In General | 3 Comments

Well some readers will remember that about 10 months ago I purchased a macbook pro and have been using it pretty much constantly since and it has been a joy. Unfortunately along the way a few problems did start to appear.

Macbook pro pitting paint

After about 2-3 months of using the laptop it started to develop loads of little black dots where my palms rested, pretty much wrecking the appearance of the laptop. I called to report this to apple expecting them to offer to fix it but instead they told me it was a cosmetic issue which wasn’t covered by warranty. This got me pretty mad considering their warranty states defective materials and If you ask me it wasn’t upto the task of what it was built for and certaintly didn’t last a reasonable amount of time before becoming damaged which to me indicates it to be a defective material! The problem is discussed throughout the internet but apple refuse to accept it as a problem. Anyway I figured that it doesn’t really impact the use of the laptop other than the resale price and of course appearance if used in a meeting or such like so I decided to just ignore it and carry on. The image below shows the problem, although mine was much worse than this.

Fading paint on strip under keyboard on macbook

Soon after another issue appeared which is a strip just under the keyboard which also started to show paint issues. Again I ignored this since I knew what the responce from Apple would be.

Red light coming on when unplugging headphones from macbook

Sometimes I would unplug my headphones from the laptop and a red light would come on where you plug in the 3.5mm headphone jack and it would disable my speakers. I searched for this problem and found out it was a little switch in the hole which enabled/disabled digital output for fibre or something like that. To get around this you simply plug in and remove the headphones several times until it resolves itself.

After experiencing a few more issues I decided to take the laptop into an apple store before the 1 year warranty ran out. Handy tip for those thinking about buying a mac… buy from a John Lewis store and you will get an extended warranty of 2 years.

Right hinge worn out

Macbook latch doesn’t work causing it to not close properly

Optical drive wont eject disks (Resolved by blowing into the drive and then hitting eject, oddly enough!)

When I showed the “genius” my macbook he said it was the worst condition he’d ever seen a mac laptop in and that he’d been working there for many years. I tried to explain that I used the laptop every day and wasn’t just your average user but he just said “Well most people use their laptops everyday”. Oh well, I couldn’t be bothered to explain the different between those who use their laptop and those who really use their laptops, if you get what I mean. He argued that the issues were cosmetic and unlikely to be covered by the warranty but to leave the laptop with them and they’d let me know. He asked me to sign a form which confirmed that I was leaving the laptop with them and that I had declined the £30 backup, I duly signed the form and left the shop with my laptop in their hands. I declined the backup because the harddrive has only just been replaced with stock HD so doesn’t contain any sensitive information, just the operating system.

Anyway, I left the store after about 30 minutes of talking to the genius and giving him all the information about me and my macbook. I got into my car and started to read through the form he got me to sign and it had some text about possible charges and T&C in faint on the back. I was a little annoyed that he advised the form was simply to confirm I was leaving it with them and declined the backup when infact it discusses possible fees etc. Okay fair point you should read all documents in full before you sign them but when someone explains to me what the form is that I’m signing then I generally just accept what they say and sign the document, especially when its somethign so trivial like warranty issues. Annoyed about this and the fact that they were arguing issues which i consider to be covered within warranty I wrote to(well, emailed) Steve jobs on saturday and this morning I recieved a call from a rep on his behalf who spoke to the staff in the apple shop and sorted everything out for me.

Provided it has all indeed been sorted out then I think I’ll buy the new imac when I go to pick my macbook up. I’m a little annoyed that I have had so much hassle getting warranty issues resolved because I have had ipods replaced with pretty much no questions asked in the past so I expected a similar level of service. If there are continuing issues with this warranty claim then I’ll probably not buy the imac just out of principal. I can get dell systems for half the price and with next day business replacement for half the price of the mac systems. Okay I admit it will not look or feel as nice but I reckon I could get over that knowing that if/when something goes wrong they will be on it straight away. You can install mac os x on a standard pc now anyway so that’s not a problem! Get a bog standard dell system, install os X, plug in a mighty mouse and mac keyboard, job done