For those who’ve been wondering why my posting rate had dropped-off, my iBook’s power supply/transformer died last week (dodgy cable) and so I’ve been living on borrowed power at work, and ignoring the laptop when at home.

My experience with AppleCare on this occasion has been – frankly – unacceptable.

Last time I was forced to call upon them (the iBook video-connector problem) service was excellent, but this time I was forced to make multiple phonecalls – with truly appalling sound quality, akin to transatlantic analogue calls circa 1978, is the last time I remember experiencing anything so bad – with the calls being fielded by staff who evidently were not familiar with their scripts, who were making things up as they went along, and who failed to call me back having promised to do so, presumably seeking to get me off the phone as quickly as possible in order to make their daily call targets.

The only way I got anything sorted in the end – after perhaps seven or eight phonecalls, plus the one where I hung up from not being able to hear the person at the other end of the line – was to get esclalated to Customer Relations who had much better phones, and quite a large dose of cluefulness.

The coup-de-grace for the problem – which was that shipping of the replacement PSU had been put on hold because the person who took my original call neglected to take my creditcard number, so I could be charged lest I not return the faulty part – was delivered by a young Irishman who was aware of Sun Microsystems and worked out from my delivery address as to why I was being especially pointed in my criticism of Apple’s hardware support process.

It’s all sorted now, thankfully; I note with interest that the new transformer has a strain-relief sleeve, integral to the design.

<Hmmm>I wonder why that is?</Hmmm>