Apple problems.

[TheMoneyMellon]

So Apple sent me the box to put my ipod in to send back to them. It says I have to comply with packaging instuctions I don't have! I don't know how exactally I'm supposed to package it, and I don't want Apple to not fix it or charge me because I packaged it wrong. Does anyone know how I'm supposed to package it?

[brooklyn brawler]

Call their number. You'll talk to a dipshit, but at least get an idea right away.

Their thing is that if they fix it, and it's their fault, they pay. If it was your fault, they may charge. I know. It's gay.

[jrock]

that same thing happened to me a few days ago.  I got the package and there are supposed to be illustrated instructions, but they weren't in the box.  I called the number, but they didn't offer much help, so I just did it myself. 

*there should  be a plastic sleeve in the box.  Put the ipod in the sleeve and seal it. 
*there  should be 2 pieces of egg crate foam surrounding 1 rectangular piece of foam.  The rectangular piece has a smaller rectangle cut out of the middle of it.  Take that piece out (the smaller rectangular piece), and put your ipod in its place. 
* Put one egg crate in the bottom of the box with the ridges facing up
* put the flat piece on top of that, with the ipod in the middle cutout.
*put the other egg crate on top of that with the ridges facing down.
*close the box

**there should be something in the box that looks like a piece of tape.  Its actually a bunch of pre-cut pieces of packaging tape.  Take these pieces off one by one, and seal every seam on the box.

***once that is done, take a look at the shipping label.  There are 2 labels, one on top of the other one.  (the top one is your address, the bottom one is the address for apple).  CAREFULLY take off the top label, and leave the bottom one on.

****Finally, drop the whole thing off at a DHL facility. 

I did this the other day, and had no problems whatsoever.  It arrived at apple the same day i sent it, it was replaced and shipped out the next day, and the morning of the third day i had a brand new ipod sitting on my doorstep (i live in Louisiana, so it had a long way to go).  My original ipod had a short or something in the headphone jack, and they still replaced it no questions asked (despite all of the dents, scratches, and chips in my ipod).  I had it for almost a year, and just made it before the warranty ran out.  Seriously, one of the best customer service experiences I've had (despite the apple call center being somewhat clueless). 

[j....soy.....]

i bought bestbuy's warranty, the dude said 'as long as it's not in pieces...you should be o.k..'

[brooklyn brawler]

I refuse to buy warranties that cost 50% of the product I just paid for.

[eight oh eight]

WHERE'S YOUR GENIUS BAR NOW, HUH?

[brooklyn brawler]

Brokeback me, I swear.

Warranties get changed every year, to include/exclude what happened the year before to dipshit customers. You will never see the price of a warranty listed beside a product, but you'll hear it being upsold to you right before you swipe your card.

They only do this to products they know people stupid people buy. If there was a warranty for a skateboard, it'd be $500USD, one board a year for five years if the skater could prove the board was delaminating.

[jrock]

i just had the general apple warranty that they give on all of their products (i didn't pay any extra).  I actually forgot about it and was just going to buy a new ipod, but i checked their policy online.  I did have to pay 30 bucks for shipping (its free if your ipod breaks in the first 6 months), but after seeing how fast i got my replacement the 30 bucks was kinda worth it.  Definitely a lot cheaper than spending 300 buck on a new ipod. Never trust those "extended warranties" that stores offer, because they'll find any reason not to honor it.  Its kind of the same thing as when they advertise a price, and then when you get to the checkout you find out that the price is after the "mail in rebate".  Good luck getting that rebate; again, they'll find any reason not to honor it, and most people forget to send it in before the expiration date anyway.   I kind of feel sorry for the checkout people because they have to ask you, even though they know its bullshit. 

[brooklyn brawler]

It's mainly commission people that drive me nuts. You hear about the extended warranty dead last.

Apple was shitty with me over a shuffle of all things. They said I only had "one tech support call", even though the product was faulty. I asked if I got a replacement, if they'd allow me "another call", but apparently they just stick to the "one call rule".

I also had an instance fixing my parents' computer. Hours into forum threads, I find out there's a "leaking capacitor problem" with that brand of motherboard. Basically, IBM didn't want to address a recall, but instead offered a free lifetime replacement on that one specific product, shall it ever have "leaking capacitors".

I've never had major problems with many companies, but it just seems the big guys get big for a reason.

[Commercial D]

Apple makes overpriced, overrated products. Try a Creative mp3 player, and turn your PC into something even better than a mac with GNU/Linux.

[jrock]

indian call centers are fun.

[brooklyn brawler]

Little girls use iBooks and iPod mini's. Grown men use PC's and make their own midi music.

[tonycoxhox]

Its funny because windows vista is finally caught up to os 10. Thats how slow and crappy they are. Fuckeeeerrs.

[brooklyn brawler]

Vista is to new computer shoppers as to what iMovie is to starving film makers.

Go ahead and glorify how your little dock can totally zoom in and out of iTunes. A real man can build a computer. Not ask a man with the figure of an anorexic woman at the counter what's "new and hip this year".

[TheMoneyMellon]

My friend picked me up to skate pretty soon after I started this thread, apparently I packaged it right except for sealing every seam on the box. Hopefully they don't try to use that as an excuse to charge me or not fix it..
I live in Louisiana too, but it hasn't reached Apple's facilities yet. I'm pretty psyched on this becuase it was my friend's ipod but he gave it to me becuase his mom is sending him to bootcamp and said it was broken but the warranty was still good. Where do you live in Louisiana, Jrock?

[grimcity]

Jrock's in NOLA...  I'm in Hammond, where are you from?

[TheMoneyMellon]

Metairie, I've skated with you at the Hammond park before, Grimcity. I went there 3 days in a row with some friends friday, saturday, sunday. There was a Lil Boosie concert in the park one of those days... I'm not too good at transition and we skated the manual pad a little. I'm kinda friends with little Trey becuase I used to skate with his cousin.

[grimcity]

Damn, this has been my second "small world" moment on the forums in the same evening. Hit me up next time you come out this way man.

[TheMoneyMellon]

Yeah I'll be sure to.

[jrock]

i wouldnt worry about it, i just made sure to seal everything just in case.  i definitely overtaped it, i just wanted to get rid of all the tape.  I'm staying at my parents house in Luling (right outside of NOLA) for now; trying to move back to SF in the next couple months.

[obeygiant]

does anyone else have just general problems .. like i have the flat panel g5 for about say 3 years now .. and everything runs slow safari and itunes ... and my ipods dont synch .. they make itunes quit when they are plugged in .. just general slow-ness of the computer and applications

[Ronald Wilson Reagan]

Vista is to new computer shoppers as to what iMovie is to starving film makers.

Go ahead and glorify how your little dock can totally zoom in and out of iTunes. A real man can build a computer. Not ask a man with the figure of an anorexic woman at the counter what's "new and hip this year".

replace "man" with "nerd" and your spot on.

[brooklyn brawler]

Do you even have enough mana to fight with me?

[Sleazy]

does anyone else have just general problems .. like i have the flat panel g5 for about say 3 years now .. and everything runs slow safari and itunes ... and my ipods dont synch .. they make itunes quit when they are plugged in .. just general slow-ness of the computer and applications

The auto defrag doesn't work. You need to buy\download the norton product to defrag it. My wife had the same problem with her computer.

The really fun thing about using apples is when all the "automatic" stuff fails. Such fun when you don't have manual options for everything.

[Sleazy]

Its funny because windows vista is finally caught up to os 10. Thats how slow and crappy they are. Fuckeeeerrs.

OK, lets here the arguement on this one, I'm curious. In what way did they catch up and what version are you compairing to? Or are you actually compairing OS 10 to all non-vista windows (2003 server, xp pro, etc...)?

[Sleazy]

Expand Quote

Vista is to new computer shoppers as to what iMovie is to starving film makers.

Go ahead and glorify how your little dock can totally zoom in and out of iTunes. A real man can build a computer. Not ask a man with the figure of an anorexic woman at the counter what's "new and hip this year".

[close]

replace "man" with "nerd" and your spot on.

I thought in that context man and nerd are synonyms. How can you be "manly" with your level of skill on a computer and that not be nerdy? It is by definition and that is why the mac ad's are spot on. Real nerds use PC and fashion obsessed kids who only use their computer for fucking around are more mac.

I know one software architect that I have worked with over the years who owned a mac but this guy had probably 8 computers at home and only used it for browsing the net and playing music and also I think he did it just to make is level of skill more robust (outshine the other nerds). Other than that, I have never worked with someone that is impressive technically and also owns a mac product other than Ipod. Mac's are design for the lowest common denominator of computer user which is frustrating for people who are actually skilled.

[grimcity]

Speaking again of catching up, aren't all the chipsets going Intel?
It'd be really sick if they started shipping with a choice of either Intel or AMD... one day, maybe.

I'm not a Mac hater or anything, during college I worked on Mac and PC, as well as a little free BSD, Red Hat, and Mandrake... but when it comes down to it, I never got on the Mac bandwagon (even when I was just a graphic designer) because I couldn't just crack open the case and swap out the MoBo if I wanted to upgrade it (or my chipset)... Apple is the shit when it comes to user interface, but everything hardware-wise was so proprietary that you couldn't really be much of a Mac gearhead.

I probably won't upgrade to Vista until it gets its first real service pack, and though I think XP is fine (when taken care of and updated), I personally think that Win 2000 Pro was the best OS Microsoft ever made.

I like Red Hat as my Linux distro, but the type of work I do rarely allows me to boot into it.

[obeygiant]

Expand Quote

does anyone else have just general problems .. like i have the flat panel g5 for about say 3 years now .. and everything runs slow safari and itunes ... and my ipods dont synch .. they make itunes quit when they are plugged in .. just general slow-ness of the computer and applications

[close]

The auto defrag doesn't work. You need to buy\download the norton product to defrag it. My wife had the same problem with her computer.

The really fun thing about using apples is when all the "automatic" stuff fails. Such fun when you don't have manual options for everything.

what does defrag mean ? im not that computer literate

[Sleazy]

basically the more you use your computer the more stuff gets moved around. As this happens the computer has to break up parts of the same files. This is fragmentation. It slows down the running of your computer because as you are running a program it will have to jump around on the hard drive from one framment of a file or application to another.

On PC's you have to manually defragment your computer with built in tools. On Mac a selling point is that they automatically defrag themselves. It's not true, it just doesn't work. So you have to buy\download 3rd party software this for you.

I have been trying a 3rd party tool for windows that works good at auto defrag for PC, it's called diskeeper. You might check to see if there is a mac version.

details

[grimcity]

Ok, imagine that your computer data is a bunch of marbles. Along with that, imagine that one file equals three or four marbles of the same color. In addition, imagine that you have a LOT of different marbles, and you need to see how many red ones you have.

A fragmented disk would be like having all of your different colored marbles scattered randomly all over a cookie sheet. In this state, to count each red marble, you'd have to spent a lot of time sifting through all of them until you eventually see how many you have. With that analogy, your computer is doing the same thing... it's reading through data that has been dispursed on a hard disk with random spaces and parts of other files scattered throughout... it slows down the process of reading data.

Defragging would be like tilting your cookie sheet to one side, eliminating all of the random space between marbles, while at the same time sorting all of the different colored marbles so that they're next to each other. If you had to count how many red marbles you had in this case, it would be easy because they're all grouped together... a hard disk like this is able to be read in less time and is therefore more efficient.

It's a pretty loose illustration, but that's pretty much it.

Edit: ...and what Sleazy said.