I’ve been getting really fed up with Apple recently. It’s annoying enough that the iPhone has brought so many people like this out of the Apple closet, without the quality control on Apple products dropping faster than a choirboy’s cassock in a Catholic church. Or more accurately, without the quality control on the Apple products I buy disappearing. And, to be honest, those are the only Apple products I really care about.
It was all so easy a few years back. My first Apple laptop, a lovely G4 Powerbook lasted 5 years with only one problem, a ratio I considered perfectly fair. My iPod Photo has lasted six years so far with a perfect performance record (touch wood). So when I decided to buy a new laptop (the Powerbook was still working but had become so slow that using two applications simultaneously became almost impossible), I didn’t think I would need the extra Applecare. The fact that Apple charged £270 odd for it didn’t make it much more appealing. Since this terrible mistake, the metal on the button to open the lid wore away and the disk drive then broke five times within a year, so Apple very fairly replaced the whole computer (for which I was very grateful). After that, the disk drive broke again, the logic board died and had to be replaced, and during fixing this, one of Apple’s geniuses broke the screen which then also needed replacing. For about a year now, the battery has also ceased working, which has pretty much turned the laptop into a desktop, and the disc drives neither plays nor can create DVDs.
Recently the computer hasn’t been sitting flush on my desk. At first I thought that the hot weather we had been having might have warped my desk, but since the cold weather (17 glorious degrees today in mid-August) has returned, it hasn’t got any better. Today I finally got round to turning the computer over to double check the problem. I found the battery looking like the photo above, and like this. It should be noted that this isn’t just slightly warped; the whole top of the battery has solidly swollen open so it cannot be closed, and some weird slime stuff is clearly visible on the inside. I took it into the Mac Store and showed it to a horrified genius with a badge that said, more like an Orwellian command than a name: ‘Will’. After trying to make sure no potential customer say it, he told me that I would have to buy a new one (at £100), at which point I kind of lost it and listed all the problems I had had with the computer and asked him if Mac made anything anymore that lasted longer than the year’s standard guarantee. He assured me that they weren’t designed to fail like that and that most people had a wonderful experience with their MacProducts (which made me feel so much better). He suggested that I book a Genius Bar appointment and told me, ‘don’t worry, we’re on your side’. I deserve a fucking Nobel Peace Prize for not losing it right then and smashing the battery into his perfectly coiffured, hipstermatic face. Nothing could be more annoying to me than an employee of a multi-billion-dollar-profit-making-company telling me that they are on my side while simultaneously shafting me with their products made in Chinese sweat shops so underpaid that the employees are committing suicide rather than come into work. So next week (for there is no appointment sooner), I will have to go in to the Mac store again, when I will no doubt be told that the computer is out of warranty and that I will have to buy a new battery. If the only alternative were anything other than Microsoft, I would be gone. But there isn’t. It’s like being a Labour supporter all your life only to have John Smith die, be replaced by Tony Blair, and then the only alternative is Dave Cameron and Gideon Osborne. And I thought capitalism was about having a choice…
nb: to be fair to ‘Will’ (if that’s his real name), apart from the ‘We’re on your side’ thing, he was a perfectly decent bloke. It’s just that, I’m sorry Will, I don’t like the forced intimacy of shaking hands with a shop-employee.
