 Apple key is falling apart

Hey  Apple!!!

It’s me —again— your loyal customer for more than 10 years.¹ Again, and like the last time, I really didn’t expect to be here —once more— complaining about you so soon.

What has happened now is, one of the keys of my keyboard is staring to show signs of wear after less than 6 freaking months of normal use. I promise you that I’m not novelist or journalist or someone that spend their entire time in from the keyboard writing and writing and writing and writing… Probably, my use of the keyboard, is much less than the expected average use of a machine like this.

It’s really disappointing that something like this happens to a product with a hefty price tag. Yeah, one has to be honest, the product is good, but the price tag is really high. One, usually, close their eyes and just buy it because quality is usually top of the shelve… but I wouldn’t say this in this case, or at least when we talk about this specific key.

To make things worse, when I’ve contacted the  Apple’s customer support their reaction wasn’t quite the expected one. Quality in customer support seems to be something that has decreased too on  Apple side lately. Since I live in a non-English-native-speaking country —Finland— I try to contact  Apple using the chat on the American site. It’s much more convenient than trying to figure out what an automatic machine is trying to tell me in Finnish. Yeah,  Apple site and customer service in Finland are only in Finnish².

After I fed then with the details of the problem —I sent then a photo of the offending key and the serial number of my machine, so they could see it’s really new— they were telling me that perhaps there’s a cost associated with the repair. WHAT? because perhaps it was due to liquid. EXCUSE ME? When I asked what they were talking about they told me that they were just informing me that could be a possibility. In other words, they were reading it from a script, instead of really thinking and take care of the case at hand³. To what I replied that why didn’t they focus on my specific case since this one clearly has nothing to do with water damage since the keyboard is working pretty well, that I’m an  AppleCare customer and that the computer has less than 6 freaking months. It isn’t justify at all this wearing off! The computer is practically new! My old MBP 2011 didn’t have any sign of wear on the keys after 5 or 6 years using it.

After all this fuzzy talking and non-sense, they suggested —in a really subtle way— that I have to turn the computer in for repair. The problem I have with that is, I live quite in a remote area⁴, so for me turning my computer in it’s a mayor disruption of my work. Usually involve more than one week, or at least one week, to send the computer to perhaps Helsinki,⁵ repair and send it back to me. So since, it isn’t a vital repair, the keyboard is working —why it shouldn’t— and I can live with it for a while —although I’m pretty pissed about it— I don’t want to send the computer over the mail for the repair. Besides, at some point on the next two months or so, I’ll need to go to Helsinki, where perhaps I’ll can repair it.

When I point this out to them and they try to find me a place where I can turn the computer in for repair in Helsinki. They ask the zip code of Helsinki, which for me is quite puzzling question since Helsinki is a million people city and it has hundreds of zip codes. I ask if they mean a zip code of the place where I’m going to stay or go in the city. So, I look on Google Maps some address on the center of Helsinki and fed to them the zip code, to which they return me re results to some place in Arizona. . I really don’t know where they think Helsinki is, but I’m sure it’s really far away from Arizona.⁶ When we clear the confusion and they finally give me results for the correct Helsinki, Finland , they tried to arrange me an appointment with one of the stores. Problem was, and still is, I told then beforehand that I didn’t know when I was going, so I just wanted to know how to proceed when I’ll have things more clear. They don’t listen, just read from the script.

Since I got the possible places for the repair I decided to get in contact with one of them so I can know what is their take on the issue. When I called the first one, they told me they don’t have a repair service any more —they just sell— since there is an official repair store on town. Ok… So I decided to get in contact my email with this official repair store, which was among the results  Apple support gave to me.

Their reply was more or less the following: The wearing down of a keyboard cap is not a valid reason to service it under warranty by Apple rules. Sorry, what? But we can replace the whole top case if there’s any issues with the keyboard like pressing a key makes a double letter or nothing at all. Even if this is intermittent and doesn’t always happen. They also state that it takes like 4 working days to get it fixed. We need to order the parts from Apple warehouse and can’t do it in advance.

In other words, it’s going to be probably much more than a week to get it fixed and perhaps even two weeks. And at that time is when I decided to write this post.

So the  Apple idea of repair something, be really environmental friendly and take care of their customers is: tear apart a whole computer⁷ and keep a customer without computer for almost two weeks for something that could be possible to be fixed in less than 5 minutes without opening the computer. Not to mention the waste of materials and energy that suppose changing a whole piece what is working totally fine.

Very good! .

PS1/ In the course of writing this post, one of the keys of my keyboard got stuck… The “U”. So, yeah! Seems that this generation keyboard also has some problems. I guess that my destiny is to switch keyboards at some point in the near future .