Ask HN: Burned by Apple Repair, are there any solutions?

[sss111]

Took my perfectly working 2020 MacBook Pro to the Apple Store last week for a battery replacement—quoted $249+ tax. They sent it to their service center, then said it wouldn’t power on, blaming a logic board failure, and upped it to $698+ tax. It worked fine at drop-off.

I've tried my best escalating but to no avail. I got it back unrepaired yesterday and it is completely dead now. It worked before Apple touched it, I don't know what to do, posting this from my phone.

Has anyone dealt with this? Any ideas on how to get it back to working condition again?

[ActorNightly]

In Apples "opinion", you are supposed to pay to play, thats what their ecosystem is designed around. Pay to get it fully repaired or get a new one. Apple owners are supposed to have money, thats what they built their brand image around.

Alternatively, its really not that hard to switch to a cheaper and more reliable, laptop with Elementary OS Linux distro.

[sss111 → ActorNightly]

it’s less ‘apple owners are supposed to have money,’ more ‘owners are dumb enough to part with it.’

Makes sense with the elementary OS rec, do you have any recommendations -- thinkpad?

[ActorNightly → sss111]

Thinkpads are pretty reliable as far as laptops go. Lenovo is owned by Thinkpad so thats worth while taking a look at as far as specs, and generally linux works out of the box. The only thing that may require some tweaking is hardware function keys, but thats a rarety.

Of course battery life will be on the average worse, as specific things like video decoding isn't as optimized as it is on MAC, but in terms of CPU heavy tasks like running VSCode with browsing, I didn't find my work MPB to be significantly more efficient.

I personally never really messed with Elementary, but I did run Manjaro on a Levovo Ideapad and things like NVPrime worked out of the box which was surprising.

The cool thing about Linux is that you can install any number of Desktop Environments and just switch between them. I3wm is worthwhile to install along whatever you use, as that is very efficient in terms of screen space, and you can often get by without using the mouse for a lot of stuff, which makes laptop use experience much more efficient.

[bigyabai → sss111]

> it’s less ‘apple owners are supposed to have money,’ more ‘owners are dumb enough to part with it.’

It's both. A fool and his money are easily parted, it's no coincidence that you're supposed to Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. When you stop having money to give to Apple, they stop rendering services, hardware support and developer tooling.

I like ElementaryOS but I'd give modern GNOME a serious look too. Something like Fedora feels closer to the modern Mac experience than ElementaryOS does, these days. But it's all pretty subjective so you may as well try both once you find a laptop you like.

[sandreas → sss111]

That's one reason I'm done with Apple.

I'd recommend to get

- Frame.work Notebook (e.g. 13 Ryzen ai)

- Lenovo (e.g. T14s)

- LG Gram

If you'd like to start with Linux as a former a macOS user I'd recommend GNOME with dash-to-dock extension. Probably you could go for Fedora. Alternatively you could use Debian or if you are more exp. maybe plain Arch or a derivate like EndeavourOS.

[amazingamazing → ActorNightly]

It’s so sad this is the top comment. It’s literally irrelevant. This could happen with any laptop running any OS.

[markus_zhang → ActorNightly]

Yeah I kinda think their hardware is great but everything else from culture to software is not what I want.

[apparent]

There is a different team within Apple that can help with this. I think it's called Consumer Relations or some such thing. They're hard to connect with, but once you do they can work magic. Don't give up on this! If they've broken your computer, especially if you can prove this via the usage history on the device, then you should be taken care of. For example, if you can show you were actively using the computer the day of the appointment, well after the time that you created the appointment, that would be evidence that you didn't make a fake battery appointment in order to defraud them.

I'm surprised they didn't turn it on or anything at dropoff. I feel like they usually check stuff or disable Find My when I drop devices off. But maybe for battery replacements it isn't necessary?

[sss111 → apparent]

They did turn it on at dropoff and I disabled find my. Are you talking about Executive Relations, I already talked to them and they couldn’t help :/

[apparent → sss111]

If they turned it on at dropoff and it doesn't work at pickup, this seems like an open and shut case.

[sss111 → apparent]

It seemed to me like an open and shut case too, but no one at apple would listen. When you sign terms and conditions at dropoff, you basically sign away rights :/

[brudgers]

If it was me, I would use a local independent repair shop that has stayed in business awhile.

Any business that has to ship things off for repair is not qualified to do repairs.

As for brands, I would avoid those with short warranties plus depot service for mission critical machines.

[mattl]

https://rossmanngroup.com/

He has a YouTube channel and does lots of repairs like this

[sss111 → mattl]

Thank you, this seems very promising! :)

[markus_zhang]

Post on X or any social media and tag anyone with 1M+ followers that hates Apple.

[sss111 → markus_zhang]

Do you have anyone in mind? Rossman is not active on X anymore