So, about two years ago, I bought a G4 mac. And it was a demo model, or possibly a return, so I bought AppleCare for it. There was some trouble; they had the machine marked as sold in August of 2002, not March of 2003. But I sent the receipt in, and they said it was covered.
Fast-forward to today, when the service guy (it’s in for a broken firewire connector) says it’s not covered. So. I’m >1000 miles from my paperwork and the machine. Argh! My instinct of distrusting companies kicks in; this is gonna be a nightmare and take weeks to work out, and I can’t even start on it ’til I get home on Wednesday. But then I think, hey, Apple’s sorta cool sometimes.
I call Apple.
Sure enough, they are able to find and fix the problem. It does help that I wrote down my “incident number” when talking to support about the machine before. Using that, they find out that they’ve got me with a service plan on a machine whose serial number ends in NFMMA, and I’m trying to get service on a machine whose serial number ends in NSMMA.
So they fix it. Right there, while I’m on the phone.
That’s sorta cool. A lot of companies do not take service that seriously, and the quality of support is one reason I like Apple.
BTW, on a related note: That new G5? Incredibly quiet. I love it to bits. It was crashy, but I replaced the cheapo memory I got for it with some slightly better memory (at a net cost to me of $0.86!) and now it’s flawless. OS X Server is teh b0mb.