Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/26/genius-bar-says-itll-cost-1.html
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Cue the people who think Apple can do no wrong, because being personally happy with your purchases means you pledge everlasting fealty to a brand.
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Yeh but no but yeh.
I went Mac in 2009 with a MBP 17 incher. Still going strong! However, I work so much in Windows, and eventually tired of WInMac solutions and compromises and updates and blabla, so when it came time to renovate my laptop for professional use, I went Dell XPS 15. Very Happily!
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Whatever Genius made that diagnosis needs to get their head slapped, because you check cables as part of the troubleshooting process; you don’t just go straight to “new logic board”.
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Have any of these Apple-quotes-exorbitant-repair-fee stories actually looked at what Apple actually charges for the repair? I was once quoted hundreds of dollars by the Genius Bar on iPhone repair only to be charged nothing at final pickup because they noticed it was a known-bad camera unit in my iPhone 5.
Repair quotes don’t equal repair charges.
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Assuming malice in this case may be unwarranted. In my experience IT departments everywhere claim the solution to any problem is to either reimage your machine or replace the motherboard. Despite the claim the “Genius Bar” is just staffed with typical IT support people.
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My guess is that the troubleshooting part is running an automated diagnostic utility, where most errors = motherboard complete replacement…
I highly doubt they take more than the most briefest look at the actual hardware, certainly not through a microscope…
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The only thing I have ever brought to the Genius bar is an iphone. The solution is nearly always to just replace the phone.
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There aren’t any geniuses at that bar.
If someone quotes you $1200, or any price that’s almost the purchase price of a new one, are you going to leave it there for repair and pray it will only be $35?
No, I thought not either.
So, yes, quotes aren’t charges, but, no, that’s not of any help here.
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They are very stable geniuses…
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Why does that matter? If my mechanic told me that my car was going to cost $10K to repair I wouldn’t have him fix it - I’d start worrying about how I was going to find the money to buy a new car. Likewise if someone tells me my laptop is going to cost $1200 to repair, I’m not going to have them fix it - I’m going to start shopping for a new laptop (probably of a different brand too, unless I’d had it a long time and knew it was getting ready to die).
I’m certainly not going to leave my car or my laptop with either of them and hope that they were wrong. That would be a hell of a gamble that I wouldn’t be willing to take.
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Wow. Trying to click through, I got a “corrupted content error.” I didn’t even know there was a corrupted content error.
Apple continues to hate their customers, and their customers continue to love Apple. Film at 11.
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It doesn’t even sound like they ran a diagnostic utility. Plugging in an external display and hitting the power button would shown them that the problem was (probably) simpler than the mobo.
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Linus Tech Tips had to pay out over $4k to just get part for an iMac Pro because you can’t get just the motherboard. You need to pay for the motherboard, processor and RAM. Yes, sometimes quotes are lower, but they’re usually about right.
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Sorry can we just have a brief moment of pedantry here?
A figure quoted for a repair by definition is the price you should expect to be charged.
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Like the Republican Establishment!
Sorry. Thought just occurred to me and I wanted to say it at least once.
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This guy does IT repair. DarkFrog is 100% right. The first and easiest check is with an external monitor, that’ll tell you if there’s any problems with the internal graphics hardware. And checking the cables is a (usually) easy thing to do that would have turned up the trouble right away.
Honestly, probably not malicious compliance so much as it was incompetent tech support personal. I’ve hired a number of folks from the genius pool and they can be pretty good when they’ve had a year or more of experience at the work, but mileage varies when you get folks who know the Mac software but aren’t hardware folks (I’m an old school PC hardware guy of course, though I had to support Macs as well in my last couple of positions).
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Has anyone else ever wondered if it’s wise to buy products that might require going to see geniuses to get it working?
I guess the rational at Apple is that people won’t feel stupid for not being able to do it themselves if it takes a genius to fix their product.
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