Apple repair turn-around time

The Apple support guy told me that mail-in repairs typically have a five to seven day turnaround time, but increased "back-to-school" load could mean ten days. I'm not sure if that's good or bad compared to other companies, but it's a long time to go without the trusty laptop, that's for sure. In case you're googling around for info on Apple repair turn-around time, as I was last week, here's my experience.
  • Sun 9/17 - Call Apple, tell them my Powerbook's drive has failed
  • Tue 9/19 - Recieve box from Apple, return w/Powerbook via DHL
  • Wed 9/20 - Apple recieves Powerbook
  • Thu 9/21 - "Repair in progress" indicator appears on apple.com/support status page
  • Fri 9/22 - "Repair complete" and "pending return" indicators appear with cute little shipping box
  • Thu 9/28 - still waiting...
I was pretty happy on Friday when I saw that "Repair complete" indicator, but it's been that way for almost a week now. It looks like this:
image of an Apple repair status indicator with repair complete, pending return and a picture of a brown shipping box

Obviously, my computer is in a brown cardboard box -- see it there? Yay! I'm about to get a tracking number but no. Sadly, that's not what "Repair complete, pending return" means. I called an embarrasing number  of times and learned that its true meaning is "Final testing (and it could take weeks, sucker)." They need to fix that #&^%@ status page.


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Comments:

Thats nothing compared to the greek support...<p> I gave my brand new MacBook to the greek apple support center because it had a faulty left speaker and now 2 weeks after my laptop is still being kept hostage by apple suport. They tell me that they are still waiting for the specific repair part and also tell me that I can't have my laptop back until it's fixed!

Posted by Panagiotis Korros on September 29, 2006 at 09:19 AM EDT #

You're right. I can't really complain, except about that "repair complete" indicator. My Powerbook shipped out last night (Thursday) and should arrive any minute now.

Posted by Dave Johnson on September 29, 2006 at 11:20 AM EDT #

I've had an HP Pavilion die on me. I sent it in on March 24th and they have kept moving the repair date forward April7th, April15th then April29th. I'm pretty much not buying HP anymore. This was a 1 year old laptop. Service claims that this is a known problem with the motherboard of my model.

Posted by Kaushik G on April 25, 2008 at 10:25 AM EDT #

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