seandenigris.com

Apple’s “free upgrade to Mountain Lion” for MBP retina purchasers, announced without qualifications at the WWDC, has a 30 expiration from time of purchase.

Sounds reasonable… except that they never put that anywhere in writing when you make your purchase… oh, and that Apple’s recent OSes have been notoriously unstable at their release… oh, and that my $3000+ laptop was freezing (i.e. worse than kernel panic, no feedback whatsoever) several times daily, and I didn’t want to complicate debugging by upgrading the OS while I was diagnosing the problem.

When you add all this up, it lead me to wait until 10.8.1 to upgrade, at which time Apple support told me that they thought the best course of action would be to screw me out of the $19 for Mountain Lion, even though I had just spent more than $3000 and they had made a public promise to give it to me for free.

So they sent me a survey with the following question:

Is there anything that the Advisor could have done better to resolve the issue during the call?

and my answer:

At issue is the standard support response at mega corporations, which is that everyone you speak to doesn’t have the authority to do the right thing, even if both sides agree on what that is. Of course the follow-up is that there is someone who does have that authority, but there’s no way to actually talk to them (in this case there was an email address to which I could send a message). So, probably the only thing “that the Advisor could have done better to resolve the issue” would be to quit their job at Apple and start a small computer company in their garage, from which I could buy computers, and receive reasonable support decisions because responsibility is not diffused among countless executives, directors, and other bureaucrats. Although, that somehow sounds familiar – oh right, that’s what Apple used to be – so until the culture evolves beyond the evil economics of Milton Friedman (i.e. profit at any cost), there’s probably nothing they can do. Also, it’d be hard to do all that “during the call” because I don’t like waiting on hold and had already been transferred four times