Apple Store - Victoria Gardens, Rancho Cucamonga, CA

We took our 1 yr old iMac to the store to do the tune up under the Apple Care program. They accidentally wiped out the hard disk and said to send the whole computer to a data retrieval company. They gave us a free 300gig external hard disk as compensation for not telling us to make a back up prior to the tune up. They wouldn't take out the hard disk for us. We went back another day and requested they take out the HD, and they did, so that we could try to recover the data ourselves. However, as we were driving home, we noticed they ripped the HD out and the S-ATA and power connectors were damaged and basically now the HD had to be sent away to be opened (a more expensive option - $2700!) to recover the data. We went back and complained, and they offered to take over the costs for the retrieval. So we took our computer home and wanted to see exactly what they had done. and we opened it to check if their are any damages inside. As we opened it we figured out that they destroyed the complete protection tape around the screen and ripped off the antistatic tape which covers the CPU and other important chips. Finally the screen itself was only attached by ONE (1) screw and a lose screw were bouncing behind the main-board. We returned the computer to the store and after a long discussion we finally received a new computer as exchange to the damaged computer and got our HD back.
The Manager was helpful but not really interested that his store damaged a complete computer. Now we are still have to recover the data. We don't trust this store anymore since they messed up everything they could. The complete procedure was very unprofessional and we spent the whole day in the apple store. We are very disappointed about this all how Apple take care of customer computers.

Lets just hope they have got one bad employee and him or her will be fired.

Was the replacement any good

Agreed, that is very unfortunate.

Rest assured, the consensus is that Apple's Support is more often than not very good, both with quality and efficiency. I'm sorry for your situation, hopefully it never happens (or even has to happen!) again.

Get all of your documentation in order and place a complain with Apple HQ. This is something I believe they would want to hear, so the problem can be fixed.

rman said:

Get all of your documentation in order and place a complain with Apple HQ. This is something I believe they would want to hear, so the problem can be fixed.

Click to expand...

Now there's a good idea.

my experiece at the store is that there are three really good genious' the guy with a sleeve ta, Jason (could be Justin) and a kinda portly (sorry dude if you're reading this) late twenties' early thirty guy with glasses. I know that last one was very vague. But if I said the white guy with glasses, that would not have worked either because every time I've been in there every employee has been white; which is unusaul for Southern CA

[Update]

Here are some photos we made of the mess. As you can see they mostly destroyed everything.