Don’t buy Apple products if you are an Indian
Strange as this may sound, this, in fact is the reality.
Don’t expect any apple support or service on its products if you are an Indian. Firstly, they don’t have a support network of their own in India – since it is low priority zone as conveyed to me on telephone by the Apple representative from Australia who I contacted. They don’t seem to believe that India is low priority as far as sales is concerned – it is low priority only for repairs and support!
Working with indecisive domestic partners – I believe they instruct their support partners to– delay repairs (standard procedures, you see) and finally deny repairs.
My Macbook developed problems with the keystrokes, and the support partner in Hyderabad Ms Ample Technologies had to make me wait for an agonizing 10 days – since they had to escalate issues to Bangalore and then further to Apple – who take their time to arrive at a diagnosis – after the weeks of investigation – which are ‘standard procedures’ the outcome conveyed is that the set is outside the scope of warranty. First shot, I was told that my Macbook might have fallen down, then they tried to tell me that it might have had dust inside and finally they tell me that it is sweat or water. All these colorful opinions emerge one after the other without one bit of certainty. This, in spite the fact that I paid huge sum of money to invest in extended warranty of 3 additional years hoping for the promised level of support.
My colleague – whose Macbook had a similar problem was instantly serviced when he was in Singapore. No questions asked. No pictures taken. No ‘standard procedures’ clauses.
In India, if you are an Apple user, you’d be denied and rejected support. If you attempt to escalate and decide to fight it out – as I did – you will find that you have no way of locating any support escalation point other than the standard 1800 phone of Apple India, who are stuffy, monotonous and helpless. Having run into a wall - I had to prise out global emails from the web to offer my point of view. Once – and if - you have managed to do all of this – phew…you will promptly receive a call from Australia – a gentlemen from Apple will offer to investigate and revert within a week – and at the end of the week, he will apologize and state that based on internal investigations, paper procedures, timelines and expert opinions the product may not fall under the scope of support.
The experience of many other Apple users is similar. My friend had his iPod failing within a week and he was denied replacement or repair. Any guess what was the excuse for denying support – the piece had water marks!!
So my advice is that don’t buy an Apple product if you are going to use it in India unless you want to be called by an Aussie from Apple and told – after due investigations - that you just dropped it in water mate!
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