Hi,
I've had my macbook air for a year and a half now, in that time it's run great. I've upgraded to 10.6 snow leopard as well. It's got 2gb of ram and has a 1.86 ghz cpu. It's kept in the house, and in a non smoking environment. I love this laptop, it's the first Mac I've bought to start learning on.
4 months ago I had to call applecare because the computer was not booting, ultimately having me go to an applestore and have them ship it out for a replacement HDD. When I got it back, I plugged in my time machine disk and it did it's magic, back to 10.6, all my files back, no problem. I was really impressed. A few months later the unit starts to erratically shut off or have random warning messages come up, kernel panics. I call applecare and explain what is going on, again they ship the brown box to the house to have it taken away again, stating that it could be the hdd. When I get it back I am surprised that it was the logic board. When I tried to do my time machine recovery it wouldn't work. All my icons and files were scattered on the desktop and in various folders. I decided to just re-install 10.6. Unfortunately I noticed that my macbook air went out with 10.6, but came back with 10.5. Odd I thought.
Trying to re-install 10.6 yielded a kernel panic every time during install, causing me to restart the computer and start over. Getting fed up, I called applecare again and talked with a senior advisor, who ran through the install procedure again, but with no success. He was going to do more digging he said and call me back. Well he never did, I left three messages with him in the course of two days, nothing. I ended up calling again, going through the entire process with another senior advisor, who would not recognize that the previous advisor would not get back to me. This advisor said that the 10.6 disk I had could be bad and he would send me another one. Failing to recognize that the computer went out with 10.6 and came back with 10.5, why was that???
When the new re-branded disk (no snow leopard graphic on it) came to the house, I tried it, and it did the same thing, kernel panic, and turn the computer off. I called the advisor back, left another message, and waited. This tech works 12-9, and he called me back at 8:40pm est. Only when I called at around 8pm leaving another message did he get back to me at 8:40.
I explained what was going on and that I've had enough of the games, calling and leaving messages, nobody getting back to me. Unfortunately all the tech did was offer to have the computer taken out another time to be looked at under their "white glove service". Of course I asked why it wasn't done like that in the first place and why has it taken so long to get this repaired, and why has nobody taken notice to the fact that the computer went out with 10.6 and came back with 10.5 and now 10.6 won't install again, it causes a kernel panic? This all was met with silence, and "I can't comment on that".
I received a email from them with a breakdown of the phone call, it stated that the computer is intermittently shutting off. I couldn't believe it, no other info stated, not that it's not taking the 10.6 install, nothing. Then in the fine print it states that if they can't find anything wrong I'll get charged 100.00?? I paid for applecare and this is the treatment I get, having to micromanage the repair of my computer???
What got me in the end, as the advisor was writing the ticket up was that he had the gall to ask me the version of the OS that I currently had on the computer... then asked what size hdd and ram I had. I felt like asking him if he was either on drugs or just didden't care. They should have all of that information in front of them on their end, as I gave them the serial number of my unit as well.
At this point I have exhausted all other options, the box is on it's way to send it out for the third and hopefully last time. Unfortunately the above experience isn't my first with Apple, because shortly afterwards I purchased a 27" imac last year and within that time, I had two brand new units, out of the box with dead pixels, one with chipped glass on the back of the screen, and after I did get one that was flawless, the screen greyed out and died 8 or 9 months later after. I had to kick and scream to get them to credit me so I could get away from the iMac line, and go to a macpro/seperate monitor. So far that combo has been running ok.
I was really hoping that Apple would really be a better product, that their customer service would be intelligent and helpfull, unfortunately for me, this isn't the case. I've got my fingers crossed that this will be the last of the hiccups and I can get back to work because in all my years of computing I've never had a computer as unreliable as this one.
I've had my macbook air for a year and a half now, in that time it's run great. I've upgraded to 10.6 snow leopard as well. It's got 2gb of ram and has a 1.86 ghz cpu. It's kept in the house, and in a non smoking environment. I love this laptop, it's the first Mac I've bought to start learning on.
4 months ago I had to call applecare because the computer was not booting, ultimately having me go to an applestore and have them ship it out for a replacement HDD. When I got it back, I plugged in my time machine disk and it did it's magic, back to 10.6, all my files back, no problem. I was really impressed. A few months later the unit starts to erratically shut off or have random warning messages come up, kernel panics. I call applecare and explain what is going on, again they ship the brown box to the house to have it taken away again, stating that it could be the hdd. When I get it back I am surprised that it was the logic board. When I tried to do my time machine recovery it wouldn't work. All my icons and files were scattered on the desktop and in various folders. I decided to just re-install 10.6. Unfortunately I noticed that my macbook air went out with 10.6, but came back with 10.5. Odd I thought.
Trying to re-install 10.6 yielded a kernel panic every time during install, causing me to restart the computer and start over. Getting fed up, I called applecare again and talked with a senior advisor, who ran through the install procedure again, but with no success. He was going to do more digging he said and call me back. Well he never did, I left three messages with him in the course of two days, nothing. I ended up calling again, going through the entire process with another senior advisor, who would not recognize that the previous advisor would not get back to me. This advisor said that the 10.6 disk I had could be bad and he would send me another one. Failing to recognize that the computer went out with 10.6 and came back with 10.5, why was that???
When the new re-branded disk (no snow leopard graphic on it) came to the house, I tried it, and it did the same thing, kernel panic, and turn the computer off. I called the advisor back, left another message, and waited. This tech works 12-9, and he called me back at 8:40pm est. Only when I called at around 8pm leaving another message did he get back to me at 8:40.
I explained what was going on and that I've had enough of the games, calling and leaving messages, nobody getting back to me. Unfortunately all the tech did was offer to have the computer taken out another time to be looked at under their "white glove service". Of course I asked why it wasn't done like that in the first place and why has it taken so long to get this repaired, and why has nobody taken notice to the fact that the computer went out with 10.6 and came back with 10.5 and now 10.6 won't install again, it causes a kernel panic? This all was met with silence, and "I can't comment on that".
I received a email from them with a breakdown of the phone call, it stated that the computer is intermittently shutting off. I couldn't believe it, no other info stated, not that it's not taking the 10.6 install, nothing. Then in the fine print it states that if they can't find anything wrong I'll get charged 100.00?? I paid for applecare and this is the treatment I get, having to micromanage the repair of my computer???
What got me in the end, as the advisor was writing the ticket up was that he had the gall to ask me the version of the OS that I currently had on the computer... then asked what size hdd and ram I had. I felt like asking him if he was either on drugs or just didden't care. They should have all of that information in front of them on their end, as I gave them the serial number of my unit as well.
At this point I have exhausted all other options, the box is on it's way to send it out for the third and hopefully last time. Unfortunately the above experience isn't my first with Apple, because shortly afterwards I purchased a 27" imac last year and within that time, I had two brand new units, out of the box with dead pixels, one with chipped glass on the back of the screen, and after I did get one that was flawless, the screen greyed out and died 8 or 9 months later after. I had to kick and scream to get them to credit me so I could get away from the iMac line, and go to a macpro/seperate monitor. So far that combo has been running ok.
I was really hoping that Apple would really be a better product, that their customer service would be intelligent and helpfull, unfortunately for me, this isn't the case. I've got my fingers crossed that this will be the last of the hiccups and I can get back to work because in all my years of computing I've never had a computer as unreliable as this one.
