"What do you want from us?? Look how little you paid for your peeeceee. And you want service too???" By golly George, them folks sure lost their marbles.

As far as customer service goes, APPLE wins hands down.

Dell, now thats another story. First, when you call, you have to go through a maze of "Press 1, Press 2" auto-attendants. I once went through 10 levels for one reason or another.

Once past this, you get the Indian tech support guy, who can barely understand me, and whom I can barely understand. Now, I have no issue with Indians, but if they can't communicate, they are useless. DELL fails miserably with customer support. The issue isn't outsourcing, its that Dell is outsourcing to illiterates. If they think hiring these illiterates is helping the bottom line, think again. I bought two Lenovo's last month instead. DELL sucks period. I sat on technical support for nearly 3 hours for something that would require an APPLE technician 30 minutes.

@ronjamin: I used to work for Apple Support at their European Support facility in Cork/Ireland. We would have been beaten with sticks (not literally...) if we would have spent 30 minutes on one call alone... :-)

We bought a MacBook for my mother-in-law shortly after they came out. It's a sweet little portable and she was delighted. Well, at least until it died.

We took it to an Apple store (we're in a Virginia suburb of DC) whereupon a dead logic board was diagnosed. The Genius asked if my wife was familiar with Monty Python (hint: think parrot skit). So far, so good. The MacBook went off to Apple and is due back this week.

In short, there are going to be a few bad Apples in any batch. It's how a company deals with the problem that forms consumer opinion. And on that score, Apple handily outdistances the competition.

I have a PowerBook G4 and was subject to the recent Sony Battery Recall. I filled out the online form around August 28th. It confirmed that replacement might take 4-6 weeks.

The new battery showed up in 2 1/2 weeks with clear installation instructions and easy return instructions.

So, on this note, Apple has done just fine in fixing the problem.

Dell customers are complaining about poor support and a lack of innovation, with numerous websites citing past problems related to Dell's hardware as well as customer service.

What does innovation have to do with customer support. If they made some kick-a** case, would their support issues magically disappear? Or is it a case where Apple users go "Sure, my computer doesn't work, and I can't get through to support, but, damn, its really laid out nice inside and out. So I don't care!"?

Dell owners can complain about innovation, but that's immaterial to any support discussion.

Hey Jeronimo2000, you know what, come to think about it, I think 99% of my AppleCare support was handled within 5 or 10 minutes. Even the stores are getting better. I mean, their service people just know how to handle you. They are trained to see a person with a problem, and they offer solutions, making you feel like their only and best customer. Does this make sense???

The company I work for buys Dells almost exclusively for non-server systems. What I've learned about dealing with support (this is in Japan) is that I never call them up anymore. I use their e-mail support and have them call me back. That saves tons of time waiting on hold.

Just the other day I had to get a core solo laptop replaced for the same overheating, random shutdown issue that Apple is having. The nice thing about Dell's Latitude support is that they come to the office and replace the part for you. The cost of that support is built into the price of the laptop, but for about the same money, it's nicer than Apple's offsite support.

I know exactly what you mean. Because - I used to train those people. :-)

(well, some of them, anyway)

Ah, happy days... I miss working for Apple.

My wife got a call yesterday regarding my mother-in-law's dead parrot, errm, MacBook. The problems were serious and they wanted engineering to look at it. So, they asked if we'd mind accepting a replacement MacBook. The support person was concerned about the potential loss of data and conceded it may be difficult to recover anything off the old drive. As it happens, the computer died shortly after we got it and so had relatively little on it that wasn't stored elsewhere.

I felt this was quite acceptable follow-up. Much better than just shipping out a replacement computer without warning.

PaL