Yesterday we noted that our intern Alex Chasick was told by an Apple Genius that Apple will not automatically replace a defective laptop after the third hardware failure. Alex followed our advice and called Apple’s Executive Customer Service line for some official answers. Here’s what he found out.

i called that corporate number and asked the operator for jeanne toulouse

the operator asked me if i had talked to her or her office before for this issue or a previous issue, i said i hadn’t, and she said ok, then she needs to transfer me to corporate customer relations

i talked to a guy there named jeff _____, and basically told him that i’d lost confidence in this computer, because of the hardware failures

he told me that the minimum requirements for apple to replace a machine are three completed major hardware failures (for laptops, he said hard drive, logic board, and optical drive—coincidentally what my three failures have been)

but three completed hardware failures apparently means that they’ve repaired it three times, so actually it’s the fourth failure that will get you a replacement

i asked him several times if this was official apple policy or if there’s some codeword i need to reference or anything because the genius i spoke to told me that he would keep repairing things and never replace them

and he said that it’s not their policy to automatically do it any time a customer has four hardware failures, but that if the customer asks applecare or someone at an apple store, they’ll replace it

so you have to ask, although it doesn’t sound like you need to be very persistent once you’ve had that many failures

incidentally, when i was experiencing my 8 logic board failures with my ibooks in college, they replaced them after the third failure, but that may have been because the ibook logic boards was a known issue

i asked him if it made a difference if it was the same component or different, and he said no, as long as it’s something major (which means no battery, casing, or keyboard), they’ll replace it after four

i also saw in the comments to my post that some people claimed that genius bar repairs don’t “count” for this repair total, so i asked if that was true and he said no, a repair is a repair

By the way, we wonder if Apple is regretting coming up with this “genius” moniker yet, considering how every time someone uses it now it sounds sarcastic.

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