I'm in the UK. Here's two of my three experiences with Apple customer support here in the UK:
I bought an iPad 3. It was so amazing. I loved it. After two months of owning it I dropped it on a tile floor. It popped out of the expensive case I'd bought, landed on its corner, and cracked the glass. I was devastated. It was brand new and cost a fair chunk
I'd heard great things about Apple's customer care. I travelled to the Apple store in London with my iPad to see what they could do. This was on Regent's street, when they had that great glass staircase going upstairs to the genius bar.
When I got there I shared the sorry story and showed him the damage on my iPad. One three feet tumble onto my bathroom tiled floor and it was cracked. The helpful staff member told me I needed to book an appointment with a technician. I said, "Ok, let's do it". He replied, "No, you can't book it here. You have to book the appointment online". I was a bit incredulous. "Even though I'm here now, in the store?", I asked. "I'm afraid so", was his response. This seemed pretty silly to me, and to make matters worse, he said the earliest availability to see a technician was in a week's time.
So I duly went home, and booked my appointment online for a week's time with the technician.
Seven days later I traipsed back into London, once again with my broken iPad in tow. I got to the store at my appointed time and asked a staff member where I needed to go to see a technician. They told me to talk to one of the Apple staff upstairs.
So up I went, and I found a bunch standing around chatting to each other. I stood there a minute and eventually one of them decided to help me. I said I was here to see a technician. I had an appointment. He asked me was why I needed to see a technician in the first place. I told him the sorry story of my two month old iPad. Without looking at my iPad, or even mentioning a technician, he just told me that they could only fix it if I paid. And the cost for any fix, big or small, was
£256.44. (That's $406 US dollars, American readers!)
I was a little taken aback. Why did I have to wait a week, book an appointment, come back to see a "technician", just for this? Couldn't the first guy have saved me some time? It was also very expensive (I could buy an iPad Mini for that price!), and I remarked that it seemed pricey. "Yes", he agreed, "do you want to go ahead?".
Apparently that was all the help they could offer.
Needless to say I was pretty upset at having to go through all this rigmarole only to be told by a member of the floor staff that there was nothing they could do. I could have saved myself a trip into London for one thing.
My second experience was when my iPhone 4S's wifi just broke one day. The chip inside started malfunctioning or something. Every time I turned on wifi, my phone would go nuts. Seriously nuts. Not responding. Crashing. Acting weird. If I turned it off, everything was fine. I'd kept it pristine. It was definitely an internal issue.
I took it into Apple (this time booking the appointment first). The technician took it away, came back and said it was a hardware fault. Great, it was less than two years old (well within the UK law), could I have a replacement/fix? No. Because I hadn't bought it directly from Apple, I would have to go back to the phone store I bought it from.
I went back to the phone store and they said Apple had to take care of it. Then they went bust. I was left with a broken iPhone 4S that was less than two years old. I hadn't even finished my contract.
Again, I left the Apple store incredibly frustrated.
