iPod Mini Woes (conclusion)

The replacement iPod mini finally arrived yesterday concluding a six week marathon without any mobile music. As I wrote before my original iPod was goosed so I got a brand new replacement.

All well and good but what really pissed me off was Apple's customer service and poor communication. For a repair status you logon to their support website where a running commentary can be found of the process. Item arrived, investigation, under repair etc. That part went fine and finally it said item shipped. Next thing I know the status says "Closed" oh yeah, so where's my iPod? They promised to email the tracking details but that never happened so I had to phone the support line (on hold for 15 minutes) speak to someone in Bangalore who finally managed to root out a tracking number for me. Piss poor.

Status pages are all well and good but they invariably are out of date or are only updated after the event. Case in point is my recent hosting problems (see previous post). They acknowledged the problem on their status page at 12:33, at 16:40 they updated it again saying still broke but hoped to have it back in 2 hours. Checked again at 18:40 no update server still down. The server finally came back at 20:30 but they never updated the status message and finally deleted it this afternoon. Piss poor.

Similarly, my problems last week with Blogger. I couldn't post to this blog for over 24 hours but no mention of any problems on their status page. I finally received a reply to a support email 5 days later saying everything seemed fine now and my issue was probably caused by a server problem they had the same day. So why didn't they mention this on the status page? Piss poor.

Tags: Apple Ipod Support
Category: Gadgets