From: gibson@silvertone.Princeton.EDU (John Gibson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Ripoff Repair Places
Date: 25 Jul 92 12:44:26 GMT
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@ernie.Princeton.EDU

In article <1992Jul23.114250@beanpot.ma30.bull.com>
mikem@beanpot.ma30.bull.com (Mike Machnik) writes:

>This is part III of the continuing saga of my attempt to repair a Mac SE.

[ long tale of woe deleted ]

>they are an authorized Apple repair place.  And if anyone from Apple is
>reading this, I think you should know how some of your licensees are doing
>business.

Remember that the Apple people on the net are not here in an official
capacity. It's not their fault anyway.

>Any other examples of places ripping you off?  I wouldn't be surprised if this

Now for my story. A few years ago, I was preparing to sell my trusty
old Mac Plus after having bought a IIci. The Plus had served me
well and was in fine shape with one exception: the speaker no longer
produced sound.  I thought I'd try taking it in to the local
authorized Mac service center to see what was wrong. If it didn't
involve a costly board swap, I would have them fix it. They looked
at it and couldn't see any problem at first.  Then they decided it
might be the third party SIMMs I had installed (?).  [I had 2 1MB
+ 2 256K = 2.5 MB.] Had I installed those SIMMs myself or had I let an
authorized Apple dealer like themselves install them? I said an
authorized dealer had done it, which was a only a small stretch
of the truth.

Later that day I got another call from them. The tech said, "I
pulled out all of your SIMMs, and replaced them with 2 MB of our
own, known-to-be-fine, SIMMs. Your Mac won't even start up now;
the screen is black. We think your logic board is bad, and since
we suspect it was damaged when your SIMMs were installed, we won't
be able to repair the Mac under Apple Care [which I still had a
few months of]. We can do a board swap for c. $400." Since I was going
to sell the machine for $500, that wasn't a good idea. I asked them
how much they would pay me to take it off my hands. "Oh, maybe $50."

Discouraged, I went home to think it over. Then it dawned on me:
maybe they made a mistake. I drove back over to the center and
asked to speak to the tech. Turned out it was a rather young guy
who seemed like an apprentice. (But don't these people have to be
personally authorized by Apple trainers, or something?) I went over
the procedure he used to exchange SIMMs for testing purposes. Then
the clincher: "Did you reconnect the appropriate RAM size resistors?"
No, he hadn't. He went back and put my SIMMs back in. I confirmed
that the Mac was fine, except for the speaker. It didn't take too
long to convince them that there was no way they were getting any
of my money for their efforts. I hope the young guy didn't get fired.

I thought about going some other place to get the speaker fixed, but
my heart really wasn't in it. So I started packing up the Mac to ship
it to the new buyer (who was aware of the speaker problem). Before
putting it in the box, I thought I'd plug it in one last time just to
check it out. The speaker worked. Probably just a cold solder joint
or a loose connection that rattled back in to place during the bumpy
ride in my car.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
John Gibson                          Princeton Univ. Dept. of Music
gibson@silvertone.Princeton.EDU