February 10, 2006
Apple lies and lies to me
I recently purchased a brand new Powerbook 17" a few months ago and the sound has been giving me trouble ever since. Every once in a while the audio skips and echoes. The first time I called Apple Support about it, they were obnoxious; like they are most of the time. The first tier of support is a joke. I called about a video problem with my previous Powerbook and the guy kept insisting that I needed to "update my NVIDIA video card drivers" on a Powerbook which had an ATI video card. Then he tried to convince me that if a kbase article didn't exist for a problem, then the problem didn't exist. Oh, geeeez...
Back to my audio problem: in looking on Apple's Support Forum, I saw that I wasn't alone with this issue by a long shot. The numbers have been growing and luckily some guy recorded the problem (since it can't be reproduced on-demand), which I think helped a lot. Another support call to Apple and they point me to a kbase article (which I'd already seen) and say that this problem exists when two or more audio applications are running at the same time. Are you kidding me? The solution is to use only one audio application at a time? This is absurd because the stuttering sound happens when I only have ONE application open at a time...and technically Safari is not an "audio application."
The thing that ticks off most people is Apple's unwillingness to admit anything officially. It took a third support call to get transferred to a Product Specialist, who (more or less) admitted the issue and that the engineers were working on it. He is going to call me back in the next day or so to let me know what the resolution is. I'm not optimistic about this, considering the track record so far, but we'll see.
It's interesting to see how Apple gets such high marks for customer service and support year after year. About 80-90% of the times I've called over the years (which is pretty rare), they always assume I'm a complete moron. While I'm sure that 90% of their calls are from the mid-western housewives who just got their first Mac and are trying to connect their camera to iPhoto, I clearly do not fall into that demographic, especially since I can tell them in detail the troubleshooting steps I've already performed the moment I get them on the phone. But this never helps and they make me repeat them anyway.
What they don't know is that I'm only pretending to go through the troubleshooting steps while they're on the phone...just to pacify them. I just make myself a cup of coffee and do other things while I'm "rebooting," etc. It's just such a waste of time.
The new OS X update is likely coming out next week and it's questionable if it contains the solution... Meanwhile, users have started a petition called "Powerbook Defect" and it's over 1000 names already.
http://www.powerbookdefect.info
Posted by severdia at February 10, 2006 2:15 PM
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