Jan 10 2009
Apple to my rescue, again.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I was writing about how Apple’s customer service had impressed me when they replaced my (long out of warranty) Macbook battery for free under an extended coverage agreement for known problematic batteries. It was easy, it was handled professionally directly at the Apple store, and it saved me $159, the cost for the replacement otherwise.
While we were camping a few weeks ago we started to experience another problem, however. The magsafe power supply started acting odd, at times refusing to charge the battery on the Macbook, and at other times seemingly starting to charge but suddenly stopping at random. As the days passed it got progressively worse, and eventually I noticed that the cord had actually split and there was signs of electrical arcing inside the wire visible through the resulting hole.
Having had to replace the Magsafe once already after an unfortunate incident with our parrot a year and a half ago, I wasn’t looking forward to the $100 price tag of this repair.
However, I seemed to remember reading something about this being a known problem, and sure enough the first relevant Google search returned this page at Engadget.
On our way home from our camping trip we stopped at the Yorkdale Apple Store and sure enough it was exchanged effortlessly. They didn’t even request our name, the serial number of the Macbook, or anything else - just our postal code. In less then 5 minutes we had a brand new Magsafe adapter in our hands, and once again left the store quite happy.
It’s situations like this that make the Apple ownership experience a joy, the actual machines aside.