At the end of the day yesterday, the status of my iBook was “Hold – Need More Info.” I decided to call Apple Customer Support to see what further info they needed so I could prod this along.
The customer service rep looked up the service record and showed that the technician wrote “No problem found” and they were preparing to send the unit back to the store for my pickup. I just about lost it on this poor guy. He told me he could enter my comments on the service ticket and they would make it back to the people looking at my computer, so I explained that there were huge white blotches over the bottom half of the iBook’s display, with several smaller ones elsewhere. If the technician would bring up an all-white window (e.g. Finder, Text Edit) there is no way he could possibly miss them. I also explained that the Genius at the store took about 20 seconds to look at it and agreed it was a problem that required service.
I could give the Apple service depot people the benefit of the doubt and assume that the Genius didn’t explain the problem properly on the service order, but to be completely blunt someone would have to be blind not to see this problem. What makes this worse is that this seems to be a known problem with iBook and PowerBook screens.
The customer service rep assured me that “one way or another we will make sure you are a satisfied customer, even if it means giving you a new machine.” This was nice to hear, but I have a feeling it may be one of those things that customer service people say to get off the phone. (Call me cynical, but we all know this happens.)
He also gave me the number of Apple’s Customer Relations department and an escalation ID, so if there’s no movement on this today I’ll be giving them a call.
More to follow as events unfold.