I decided to upgrade my system last week, and outfitted my home office with a nice mac pro, complete with dual 20″ displays. I spend much of my waking life at the computer so I figured it was worth it to splurge and I made the conscious decision to pay that extra cash to get more than enough hardware, and the option of being on Leopard instead of Vista. I am fully impressed and satisfied with the systems performance and interface BUT when I set things up I realized the build was mis-configured!

The system was not installed with the optical DVD drive I had purchased! I am shocked. I could have bought a car for the money I paid! I figured the three business days it took them to ship the system was a QA cycle. What happened?

Today I got on the phone with a customer service rep to address the situation. No biggie, I figured, I’ll just get them to send me the part and I can either install it myself or bring it over to the Apple Store. I have heard from Apple service folks before that the online store and the physical store location are two different entities, but certainly they can communicate on a service issue like this. NOT THE CASE! “We can’t really do that, they are totally separate.” was all the rep could offer me.

“OK Fine”, I said. “Send me the part.”

“Well, I am going to have to process this as a return because we don’t sell that part online.” the rep stammered.

“What? I don’t get that. There is obviously a part missing, get your hands on it and ship it to me.” I was getting a bit heated at this point.

“Well,” he explained, “the part comes from our shipping center, and I don’t have the ability to get the one you need.”

“So really this is a communication problem with your warehousing and fulfillment infrastructure? ” I proposed for him.

Silence.

This didn’t seem to be going anywhere for either of us at this point so the rep changed his strategy and asked if I wanted some free speakers. I conceded and settled for a copy of Office 2008 instead and am going to have to part with my brand new precious system for a few days to get it reconfigured. As a customer I was very dissatisfied my customer service experience, and as a share holder I am worried about the communication and quality assurance problems I uncovered. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect more and certainly hope someone at Apple is reading this post; my contact info is on the About this Site page if you care to take this off-line.

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