Apple has Thru-the-Roof Customer Service

I have a Macbook Pro retina as my main work machine.

It has been working fine until about 6 months ago when it started to become unstable. The problem seemed to be related to overheating and the discrete GPU. In the beginning it would just reset once in a while or refuse to turn on the screen after sleep.

This is about when the 2 year Danish consumer warranty expires and I was travelling SE Asia. So I tried various things such as software utilities for increasing fan speeds or for turning the discrete GPU off.

It worked in the beginning but the problems got worse to the point where sticking the computer into the aircon for 2 minutes no longer worked. And just after I crossed the border from Vietnam into China the computer was not able to run for more than 30 seconds before the screen went blank.

Just before this happened Apple had setup a program offering extended warranty for GPU-related problems for my model. Appearantly the problem stems from poor soldering of the GPU where it gradually becomes disconnected from the logic board and causes the whole machine to become unstable.

I decided to give it a go – so in Shanghai on a Saturday evening I went into the Apple Store at Hong Kong Plaza and explained my problem and handed in the machine.

Now this is in China where it is hard to find anyone speaking good English, even at an Apple Store.

Less than two days later I got an email asking me to contact the store. After a confusing 45 minutes on the phone I was transferred to someone in America telling me that the repair was cancelled and that was all he could see on the file.

The next day I show up in the store expecting to have my computer back unrepaired since I appearantly did not qualify for the extended warranty.

Well it turned out that the reason they had cancelled the repair was that they needed to reinstall the OS since the drive had been corrupted and wanted to offer me backing up my files before they did it. I backed up my computer to an external drive and about an hour later I walked out of the store with a computer runnning as good as new.

Needless to say I was very satisfied.

I know of no other company where you can buy a computer in Denmark and have it serviced in China 2 1/2 years later. This fast, with this level of care and without cost eventhough the company has contractual obligation to do so.

And as a unexpected bonus: Two weeks later I clicked “About This Mac” and noticed that the machine no longer had 8 GB but 16 GB RAM.

Update February 2016: Apple finally recognized “Stain Gate” aka the keyboard scratching the screen as a production fault and I just got my screen replaced. Making this 3.5 year old lady looking as fresh and young as ever.