My upgrading path to Apple Silicon — Part 3

The ordering process

Purchasing a new computer comes in several phases: planning, configuring, ordering, fetching, and configuring. If one is upgrading their main working machine, then it is even more important to get through most steps in the smoothest way possible.

In the previous two parts (part one, and part two), we looked at the first two steps: planning and configuring. I eventually settled down with a 16” MacBook Pro with M3 Max SoC (the base Max, with 14 CPU-cores and 30 GPU-cores), 36 GB of Unified Memory, and 2 TB of SSD.

The ordering phase, which constitutes most of the shopping experience from the customer’s standpoint, is equally significant and, sadly, it didn’t go well.

Trying to pay!

I don’t know about you, but I do not spend this kind of money every month, so my credit and debit cards have a much smaller limit. Luckily, I thought, I can increase it! Right? Well, kind of… At least with my bank, one can increase the limit of the credit card by 50%. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to cover both the Mac and the AppleCare+ together.

Instead of removing AppleCare+ from the cart—which I knew I could purchase up to 60 days after registering the product—I tried to increase the limit of my debit card to exactly the needed amount. The order went through but on the following day, when the payment is usually processed, I got two messages:

1. A notification from my bank that I had been charged for AppleCare+ (apparently this and the computer are two separate parts of the order)
2. Shortly after, a message from Apple saying that there was a problem with my payment method.

The funds were there, the card was valid, and yet, it was not accepted.

I called Apple Support who tried to help by re-authorising the payment, which caused a new payment for AppleCare+ and still no payment for the Mac due to… lack of funds!

Beware Apple Pay

The assistant (she/her) proposed to cancel the order and to start anew, luring me in with an offer of 3 months of Apple TV+, Apple News¹, Apple Arcade, and AppleCare+. I should specify that the assistant spoke in a good Italian, but replied from Greece, and for the rest of the day I would have gotten to know most of the Greek Apple Support department.

We went on and, this time, I decided to authorise a “maxi payment”² from the card I use for Apple Pay and to use that instead. The order went through! Hurrah!—I thought! My positivity was short-lived, though. The “maxi payment” lasts for the calendar day it was requested on and, when the payment was processed, it had already expired. So, the payment failed again, with a new message from Apple saying that my payment method wasn’t valid.

I tapped on the order in the email to go edit the payment method. What I didn’t know was that, when you pay for an order with Apple Pay, it gets processed as a “Guest Order”³. If everything goes well, though, you get a button in the top left of the page saying something like “Connect to Apple ID”. This order didn’t have it, and trying to recover info about the order said that “This order is connected to another Apple ID”. Still, the confirmation email came to my address, so what ID was used for the order? In the end, I could do nothing but call Apple Support again.

More maelstrom…

This call bounced me back and forth between several departments, every one thinking they had the solution before delivering me to a colleague who had no idea why I was calling and what the problem was. The bewildering thing is that the post-sale department thought the technical dept. had the power to link my purchase to the Apple ID, while the tech dept. was sure that only post-sale could help. All this, waiting in the line for too long to believe. Finally, in exasperation, I hung up and called again.

The light at the end of the tunnel

This new assistant (she/her), this time replying from Italy⁴, explained that, to give me those 3 months of bonuses, the previous assistant had to connect the order to an Apple ID that was under her control. She recognised this as a suspicious behaviour and wrote a note for her supervisors to let them know about what this other assistant had done.

We cancelled the order once again and, this time, she cleverly sent me a confirmation link to allow her to act on my Apple ID’s behalf, through which she could send a new quote connected to my Apple ID.

I went through it, authorised the “maxi payment” again—ready to do it on the next day if necessary—and, this time, the order was processed correctly. A few hours later, so on the same day, the payment was also processed and, a week after the payment, the Mac got shipped towards me.

Bottom Line

Even the best companies face hardships, but one of Apple’s strongest points had always been their customer care and support. This shows how all the advisors who assisted me—apart from the last one—had been poorly trained and were not at all ready to face the issues.

It took me three days, with six hours spent on the phone with them, to get the order through. Who will give me back those six hours I should’ve spent working and creating? Who will take responsibility for this? As usual, no one, because at this level these companies are untouchable.

I don’t believe the issue is with the nationality of the advisors, or with where they are located, rather with the level of training they are offered and in the software managing the call transfers. When such an expensive product is being ordered, you need to transfer the call to a department which will solve the issue in 10-15 mins maximum!

Let’s hope I forget about all this when the Mac arrives to its new home!

Stay tuned for future episodes, where I plan to describe every step in its configuration. If you have any questions, or would like me to test specific things for you, please consider using the contact form on the website or leave a comment down here, and I will reply as soon as possible.

Thank you for reading so far, and until the next one, stay safe.

1. I should have smelled this wasn’t right here because Apple News is not available in Italy ↩
2. A formula that allows me to authorise a single payment up to € 5000 without touching my card’s limits. ↩
3. Browsing on the Apple Discussions forum alone, I found more than 500 people having the same issue. ↩
4. But this should not matter, since I had been served excellently from Apple Support advisors from many countries, on top of my head: Egypt, Albania, Romania, etc… ↩