(I’m trying to adjust my shopping habits for quality, long-lasting goods from reputable brands. This isn’t some hailcorporate thing)
I don’t trust brands, I trust their customer support.
Any device/product can fail, no matter how excellent it is. To me, what matters is how efficiently the issue is dealt with by the support.
Like, I trust Apple customer support and now, after approx. 40 years being their customer, their customer support is the sole reason I’m still buying Apple stuff (I don’t like at all what they became and how they make their device unfixable on purpose, it’s a shame for a company that so much pretend to care about being eco-friendly). I’m also a fountain pen user and a collector, but the brands I trust the most are not the most hyped and expensive, far from it, they’re TWSBI and Lamy, because of their amazing customer support. Or, say, I mainly wear Merrell shoes for hiking (because they fit me well, obviously) because they have a fine customer support. And so on.
I have zero brand loyalty beyond that, and will not hesitate to change brand if they ever cut on their customer support.
Better call customer support.
Of course, they’re just going to tell you to turn it off and back on again.
I’ll never forget when the internal speaker went on my first iPhone, a 3GS. I put off getting it repaired because I was so used to having to send my previous Nokias and HTCs back and being without my phone for a couple of weeks. But the warranty was about to expire, so I bit the bullet and booked an appointment to get it sorted.
Walked in to the appointment and walked out ten minutes later with a brand new phone.
That sold me on Apple’s customer support.
I will say though, that the support seems to have tanked over the past few years. That they’ll jump on any blemishes on the device as a reason to not honour the warranty. Like how the screen in my XR had a tiny burn right at the edge (I was a welder at the time and stupidly had it in the top pocket of my overalls), which they used as reason to not work on it when it kept freezing. They demanded I pay £150 for a replacement screen first, which I refused, so they returned it to me. They’d taken off the screen protector, so I then had to argue with them for weeks to get them to replace it.
To be clear, Apple’s Support has its fair share of drawbacks and always had — I’ve been their customer since the mid-80s, there never was a magical period where they were perfect ;) — but what matters (to me, at least) is that while the product is under warranty a customer doesn’t have to worry too much on average (because, once again, there will be cases where support will fail the customer).
Outside of warranty, that’s an other story but then the real issue is in the way Apple designs its machines to not be upgradable or not easily fixable, if at all. That’s the real shame and that should be outlawed.
