Blogging Roller

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...

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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:

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.