Perhaps it could be, but if it were a viral I suspect they would try to make Apple's tech support seem particularly impressive. For example, the customer service reps could have figured out the particular problem and helped him order the necessary parts.
In my opinion, this story doesn't seem to make Apple's support appear particularly good or bad.
Virals are getting trickier to figure out, that 'one night stand Danish girl with baby' from a while ago I called immediately and I got nothing but flak for it, that one turned out to be on the money, not having a clear beneficiary does not seem to be a hindrance.
The basic formula is still the same: every viral video has to be either funny or urgent. It's just that executing is harder because there is more noise. So while it's getting harder to predict which videos will go viral, you can still do a pretty good job of predicting which videos have the potential to do so.
Now that is customer service! Yet I'm surprised that they just directed him to a store where he could buy parts rather than trying to sell him a new one.
