sesam.hu

Engineering Manager | Trail Runner | Stockholm, Sweden

Boomer's insides

Wednesday, 6 August, 2008 - sesam

I just got back from the Apple Store with the ill-fated black MacBook. It's working fine, good as new, after the repairs.

Originally I asked for the keyboard to have swapped, since apparently it was the only part malfunctioning. The Apple employee I talked to defined the issue as "tier 2 accidental damage". (If you're new to the story, I poured half a liter grapefruit juice over the keyboard.) I explicitly asked the repairs to be canceled if the damage exceeded that of the keyboard's and the LogicBoard needed to be replaced as well. The main reason of this being the fact that a LogicBoard replacement costs almost as much as a brand new MacBook.

Well, they called me yesterday, saying the repairs were done and I can pick the MacBook up any time I wanted. I went to Osaka today to do so. The laptop I received honestly looked identical to the one on the day when I just unboxed it. They cleaned the whole thing. I didn't even bother looking at the maintenance reports until I got home...

And boy, was I in for a shock! They didn't just replace the keyboard. According to the repair staff, they swapped - besides the whole top case with the keyboard - all the cables inside, including the HDD connector (which was corroded I admit, but it worked fine nevertheless), the cooling fan and the AirPort wireless card (which was also functioning, I downloaded updates with it before I sent the MacBook to be repaired).

And that's not all of it. The report then continues to explain that during the standard testing the built-in camera was malfunctioning as well, so they replaced the LogicBoard too. And they did not charge me for it, for a reason still unknown to me. The MacBook is way out of warranty now and the damage was entirely caused by my clumsiness after all.

Thinking about it, the black MacBook now only has the DVD drive and the bottom casing with the monitor that are original. Everything else had been replaced.

I am now officially in love with Apple support. First they swapped the failing battery for free, and now I got a full LogicBoard replacement gratis.