chrispeden.com

I recently had to deal with a dead hard drive in my iMac, and here is how it went.  So last week I put my iMac to sleep and retired for the night, now the next day (actually night) I go to wake it up and I get this horrible screech and then a constant beeping.  Meanwhile the screen did come on but i had the beachball of death because nothing was responding.  Long story short, after troubleshooting I determined the hard drive had died.  Now I do have Apple Care on this machine so I go to call Apple Support.  Look up the number on the website, make the call…..Im greeted with a “Support is closed” type message.  WHAT! are you kidding me?  HP support is 24×7 and think so is Dell’s.  Ok Apple you don’t have 24×7 support for everyone, but I bought Apple Care, shouldn’t I get better than your standard support offerings?  I certainly think so.

So I hangup and head back ot the website, thinking maybe they have a live chat support or something.  Nope they don’t, however I do find a option to “schedule” a support call.  So I go this route and schedule a support call first thing in the morning.  Next morning comes and like clockwork my phone rings and its Apple support. (awesome!)  So the support guy was very nice, knew what he was talking about and didn’t treat me like a dumbass.  Thats something I hate with a passion.  He asked a few normal basic questions and I told him what I had done to troubleshoot, which he said “Well you have done pretty much everything for me”.  LOL.  He says they will replace the drive no questions asked, but that I have to take my machine to the closest Apple store or authorized reseller/repair center.  Closest Apple store for me is a 2hr drive to Chicago which I didn’t want to do, so luckily I learned I have a place called Pixel Creek which is only 15 minutes from me.  Thank god.

So I call Pixel Creek asking them a few questions as far as how repairs go and find out to my surprise they don’t have escalation policy from their normal 2-3 day turnaround time.  This was somewhat odd to me because I was basically saying, “I want to give you money” yet they didn’t want to take it.  So with this being my only option I take my Mac over and drop it off.  Now while there I did ask if I would get the old hard drive back, which to my surprise they said no because Apple required it to be sent back to them.  They did offer to do the repair “out of warranty” in which I could get the drive back.  I have no doubt that Apple requires this but I have to wonder, why?  I don’t see Apple doing much with them and frankly what if I had important sensitive data on that drive.  I wanted to make sure it got destroyed.  Whereas at this point its still very possible that it could end up in the hands of someone who has the ability to extract data from it.  I’ve read many reports of people buying computers and hard drives from ebay, computer shows, or other such events and finding out they could recover the person’s tax records, financial accounts etc.  I left Pixel Creek and hoped for the best.

The next day comes and to my surprise around 2pm I get a call saying my iMac is ready to be picked up.  Kudos to Pixel Creek!  Overall this experience went well, only a few minor irritations.