Stop Core

This in from a reader:

The semi-colon key on my one year old MacBook Pro popped off yesterday. I took it into Core to see if I could get it fixed. Despite the fact that the broken part is a 50c clip, they wanted to replace the entire keyboard at a cost of R2,500. I took out my pocket knife and fixed it myself while arguing with the service agent. The clip is still broken, so the key does not sit straight, but at least it works again.

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This is based on an email we got to info@stopcore.co.za

Hi, not happy with Apple service in general. Orders take far too long, I wanted Aperture and after 3 months still not available thru Apple Waterfront store. Also with malfunction of mouse they wanted to send it back to factory, wanted it replaced since it was new, I have bought 2 IPods 160 Gig there, 2 Mac Book Airs and two big pc’s so feel I am entitled to some kind of service, but alas….

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Originally from: http://za.charlesleaver.com/2009/06/bad-apples/

I have a Macbook Pro 15” 2.2GHz which was purchased in 2007. I purchased AppleCare with it locally as the company I work for has an arrangement which allows them to purchase AppleCare locally. Doing a warranty check against my serial number on the Apple website confirmed that the warranty expires in 2010. The machine started giving me graphics related issues, but they weren’t consistent so I didn’t take it in for a few days while I tried to find out what the problem was, if any. I ended up running Apple diagnostics and unfortunately my suspicions were confirmed as I was told that I do indeed have a graphics card issue. I then found out that this is a common problem with Macbook Pros that have NVIDIA graphics cards like my one and that Apple extend the standard one year warranty to two years for this fault. Given all of that I felt that it was safe to assume that this was a fairly common problem that Core must surely see pretty frequently, and that it couldn’t be too hard to diagnose seeing as even I was able to diagnose it, and that given how common the problem was, Core would be silly to not keep stock of the replacement parts.

I was going to take the machine to the Core technical center in Jet Park, so I went to the Core website to find the address. Mmm, confusing. The website still said that Core were in Kramerview. Confused and not wanting to go all the way to a location in Jet Park that I had yet to confirm the address of, I tried phoning them. Not ONE of the numbers on their contact page worked!!!!! I asked a friend who used to work for Core if she could find out for sure whether I was able to take the machine in to an iStore, and she said I could, so I took it to Clearwater and booked it in all officially etc. A few days later I phoned all the numbers I could find for the technical center to see how far they were to solving my problem, and was told that the machine wasn’t even booked in yet, despite the iStore having said that they have a daily courier service between all iStores and the technical center. I then began many frustrating days of trying to get through to Core and simply not succeeding. I was given an email address for a supposed “Nuno” who I wrote an email to, only to have it bounce as he doesn’t really exist. I had a security guard answer a phone after ten minutes on hold only to tell me that I must phone back in ten minutes because nobody was there and that he was just a security guard and I must not get cross with him. Not there?? In the middle of the day?

I’m sure you can appreciate how I was feeling about Core (and Apple in general) at this stage. Pretty damn furious. And that aside, if you have a Mac or a job then you will appreciate either how much I was hating not having a Mac, or how much my work was being negatively affected by not having a proper machine to work on.

I finally managed to get hold of Core and was told me that a quote had been sent to the iStore many days ago. Thanks iStore, don’t bother phoning me or anything. I’m sure my sensors will just figure this one out for themselves. I told them that being sent a quote was crap and that they didn’t need a proof of purchase when they were being told quite clearly by Apples own website that the machine is under warranty until 2010. I was told they would let the technician know. I wasn’t told that this was code for “thanks a lot sir now you can begin another four week wait during which you have no idea what’s happening as you can’t get hold of us.”. But that’s what happened.

Tick, tock.

When you reach this point you become stuck as to what, if anything, you can do about it. I thought about Hello Peter‘ing them but decided that this wasn’t going to make any difference with a company that clearly gives rocks for whether they have unhappy clients or are providing an even vaguely decent service. Besides, enough people had already complained there, and they were mostly all still unhappy. Stuck as to what my plan was, I dreamed up different ways for them to die, and made some of these public (on every social network that I’m on thanks to ping.fm).

And what an excellent plan that was, as I was immediately given the attention of the first of two of the only one decent people to work at Core. In an email I told him: “I don’t have the energy or time to baby such a large collection of incompetent people, so who knows how long this is going to take if you or somebody else there isn’t able to help. As much as I love my Mac, and you must understand… I really really love it, this kind of situation is going to play a large part in deciding whether or not I spend another R30 000 in a few years when it’s time for my next machine. It’s _really_ bad service!!!!”. This was only sent to him at around midday, and yet that very same day he had managed to track down on their side what the story was, make a decision on whether they could help me or not, and what help they’d give me, get the second decent person who works there to fix the thing and have him phone me to find out whether I wanted a certain partition on that machine and finally to have him reinstall Leopard on my machine. Very impressive! My problem was immediately solved. It took another three or four days for the machine to return to the iStore, but I was happy to be able to fetch it on Friday after work, despite the time being 20h00… yes, 8 o’clock in the evening.

After all of that I hadn’t wanted to spend any more of my life wasting time with Core, as I just did by writing this post, but if it’s going to help make up the mind of a potential purchaser of a Mac who doesn’t really have R30 000 to spend on a laptop but has been told really good things about Macs, then I guess it wasn’t that much of a waste of time.

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RJ van Spaandonk from Core had a minor tirade yesterday on Twitter and has now blocked some of the Stopcore members via Twitter. His tone in these twitter posts were extremely condescending and sarcastic, a tone we have tried to avoid. The simple truth is that while StopCore.co.za might be a strong message, all we want is some engagement. Ultimately we are his clients and instead of telling us off he should really rather be interacting with us. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that if the local Mac community was spoken to on issues rather than an attitude of ambivalence and derision then sites like this would never exist. His Twitter stream was solely about pricing and that is not the only issue, not by a long stretch. All the Apple users in this country we’ve spoken to have the attitude that they will pay a premium if they get premium service that one gets from a company such as Dell in South Africa.

This post is originally from The Mac Blog and can be found here.

So, RJ van Spaandonk, Executive Director of the Core Group, has discovered Twitter. And has chosen to use it, to get his point of view out. Excellent! What this debate needs is some real engagement and some real truth. Especially after Redi Direko (once again) kicked her personal journalistic integrity to the curb, in mis-handling the debate on her show on 702 Talk Radio yesterday.

Now, I’m all about the Twitter, and I believe he has a great opportunity to engage the small but vocal and highly-networked geek community that is the SA Twitter-sphere, to both his, and Core’s advantage. Well, at least, I did. Until I saw this morning’s RJ-stream:

Reading RJ’s tweets make it perfectly clear why the Core Group has such an adversarial stance toward it’s customers. And to be clear, that’s what started the whole brouhaha. The CAB issue, the StopCore website and the price-difference fixation are all expressions of the customer dissatisfaction at the appalling, arrogant attitude which has sadly become a hallmark of the Core Group.

It comes from the top. Core’s attitude is reflected in the snide tone of RJ’s ‘facts and suggestions’ tweets. The company line is clearly an extension of RJ’s personal way of looking at the situation and handling it.

I think it’s time for Mr van Spaandonk to acknowledge his PR-Disaster status, step aside and get some professional help.
A PR agency, perhaps…

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This is a post originally posted by Craig Nicholson on CraigN.net and talks about a complicated purchasing experience

No I’m not talking about the fruit although I do find similarities between the fruit and the people who represent Apple in South Africa. The first thing to note is that Apple products have one authorised distributor in South Africa and they are the Core Group. The same company that distributes the Nintendo products at such a ridiculous mark-up.

However it seems that there are plenty of non-authorised resellers in South Africa, but the Core Group can’t seem to decide who is who. They have a local site addressing the grey product issues and they even provide a form for validating your product serial number, albeit a non-automated process. If you compare the following two pages (page 1 and page 2) you will notice that they don’t agree on who the non-authorised resellers are. I think this is ridiculous, how is the consumer supposed to know which list is correct?

Regardless, I decided I wanted a new 15” MacBook Pro 2.8 Ghz,4GB of RAM and 320GB 7200 RPM drive. Yeah I wanted the fastest processor and hard drive that the Apple store in the US offers. I proceeded to call a few of the local resellers seeing as the local online store called the Za Store provided zero customisation options.

Authorised reseller #1: Questek Broadcast Technology

I started by calling local authorised reseller Questek Broadcast Technology for a quotation on the custom configuration I wanted. After numerous unreturned calls on Wednesday and Thursday, I finally managed to speak to the one person that seems to do quotes. She promised me a quotation on email before the end of Friday. To her credit she did call me later in the day and inform me that her email was down and she’d send it when it was up again. On Tuesday I got an email stating:

I do apologise for the inconvenience, however our systems have not been working.

Please be advised that you will be getting your quote today, I just need to finalise a few prices for you once that has been done you will be getting your quote.

So much for Friday’s excuse about the email being down, she doesn’t even have the pricing on Tuesday. Mind you, I never got the quotation on Tuesday either.

Authorised reseller #2: iStore in Clearwater Mall

I called the iStore in Cresta on Wednesday and was told to email Dimitri and he’d get me a quotation by the end of the day. I’m still waiting.

Authorised reseller #3: Digicape store in The Wedge

A few friends recommended dealing with the company DigiCape. So I called their Johannesburg store on Saturday late afternoon and my details were taken for a quotation on Monday. Once again, no quotation was received.

Non-authorised reseller #1: CAB Platinum Store in Sandton City

On Saturday I visited the slick looking CAB Platinum Store in Sandton City after being advised by friends that they are useless. The first thing I noticed was that all of the standard configurations were priced around R4000 more for the exact same box product. Ridiculous. I approached the so-called Knowledge Bar to find out about a custom configuration and was delegated to a back office woman who proceeded to quote me on a standard configuration machine with an additional 320GB 5400 RPM drive. Hmmm, useful, NOT! After I reiterated my requirements my details were taken down and a quotation was promised on Monday. To date, no quotation has been received.

After much frustration and irritation I realised that in South Africa, if you wish to buy and Apple product, you need to simply accept that the distributor, Core Group, knows what you want and its one of the standard configurations. However a few friends did suggest that I go to the USA and buy one there. My problem with this would be the warranty although I’ve heard that local warranty support has much to be desired.

Determined to get myself a Mac in time for Christmas, I called up Incredible Connection in Sandton City on Sunday afternoon and purchased a new 15” MacBook Pro with 2.53GHz processor, 4GB of RAM and 320GB 5400 RPM hard drive.

My advice to anyone considering buying a Mac, go for it, and hopefully the Core Group sorts their reseller channel out so you have a better experience that I did.

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Today I had the pleasure of going to the Apple store in Melrose Arch although pleasure is far from apt. I walked into the store and no one helped me so I went to go help myself. Now I walked from the entrance, past the expensive Macbook’s, iMac’s and Macbook Pro’s to the back of the store. Now in this time there were about three sales people standing around looking bored and I walked past each and every one of them. Not a single one of them helped me and not a single one came to help me when I eventually got to the cabinet with earphones.

Now I wanted some earphone’s for my iPhone which means they needed to have a remote and a mic built in to be truly useful. I found a pair that supposedly had a mic and remote but wasn’t sure if they were compatible. When I finally approached a salesperson he wasn’t able to tell me whether the earphones would work and didn’t even know the price. Now I don’t expect them to know the price on everything but these were generic, Apple branded earphones so how hard would it be to know the price?

Behind me another customer was being helped with an adapter for his video output on his laptop and the salesperson had no idea which one to sell him. Now considering there are only two types of adapters how hard is it to impart this knowledge?

Not only are Apple salespeople incompetent (operated badly and trained by Core) but something makes them totally indifferent as well.

Shocking.

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