My upgrading path to Apple Silicon — Part 4

The fetching/delivery process

The time is nigh to go fetch the long awaited “maxi” boy from the Apple Store. I decided to have it delivered there because of recent thefts in the hall of my building. Granted, those all happened with Amazon couriers, who are given far too many daily deliveries compared to what they can humanly handle. They therefore just ring the entry phone, run inside, and leave your package unattended. Couriers handling Apple shipments are given precise instructions to deliver only manually to the recipient and, recently, have started to ask for a PIN code. I didn’t want to risk it this time, though.

The Apple Store experience

Entering an Apple Store in this season is like being in a movie: all workers with their red shirts, customers running around trying devices and an absurdly high volume of chatter.

Orders pickup is handled on the first floor, upstairs, in the same place where the Genius Bar is. There is a dedicated table with two assistants with a big “PICK-UP” sign above their heads. On the table, possibly to entice you into buying more than you actually came for (or need…), there are Apple Pencils, HomePods, AirPods, and more accessories.

I showed the Apple Wallet card that was sent to me by Apple—a very nice software thing showing an image of the store you are in—to an assistant, and I was then told to wait a bit. While waiting, I asked if the best path to add AppleCare+ was by phone, since this was an EDU product. She appeared not to be sure about it and tried to add it now, but the price was not EDU, so I refused. The problem here was that I was told “oh, the EDU price is the same as the normal one”. Well, no, it isn’t, and you should know better than me. Once more, I’m not blaming the person, I’m blaming Apple for not offering the proper training to these people.

Another assistant soon came carrying several boxes piled one on the other, landing them on the table. I wanted to check that everything was right, but I was not provided the opportunity as they started to pack it in a bag. This 16-inch MacBook Pro box is so big that the bag fits by the millimetre. One could think it is a design choice but no, cool down, it is just the biggest bag they have. I asked if they had a bigger one, and they replied no, so I joked:

What would you do if one bought an iMac or XDR Display?

They replied:

Well, those boxes have handles.

I stopped there, but I asked myself: what if I do not want to go around showing what I’ve bought? What if it is raining outside—given the season—and I would rather not ruin the box (which can be a present, so should not get ruined at all!)? First disappointment here, and first warning for you who are reading: bring a bag from home big enough to carry your purchase around and, possibly, to protect it from harm.

One thing I didn’t realise when I was there, but just home when I took the box out of the bag, was how dirty and ruined the box was. There were several blackened stains in six spots and a 5 mm spot where the paper surface of the cover had been scratched away. The bag as well had numerous blackened stains. Here are some pictures to let you see what I’m talking about:

This is not about ecology.

Thinking about how this could’ve happened, I understood that the Mac arrived at the Store five days before I could go fetch it and had to stay in their warehouse. But why didn’t it stay in the courier’s box until I came there? Why was it put there in a place that, surely and sadly, doesn’t get often cleaned—even if it should, I guess?

Some of those stains, though, look like the effect of some workers not washing their hands properly, or touching a dusty surface before handling these boxes.

I don’t believe, though, that this has anything to do with the people working there. Since a few years, Apple no longer wraps their boxes in that slim plastic film that was a joy to unbox, saying that this is to save the environment. That’s not the case, though, because you can use a recyclable plastic—which I assume they already were. There are plenty of fully recyclable plastics out there, so this is a choice to save their money, not the environment. Even if that wrapping costs 1 cent, packaging machines are much more expensive, so why not adding those two paper strips with some glue on the inside of the top cover, instead? Besides, how ecological is that glue? Adhesive paper is harder to recycle, as far as I know.

With that protective layer, nothing like this could’ve ever happened.

Imagine if this box was not for me but, say, for my nephew. How could I have given this as a present in such a miserable condition?

It’s the experience

Before this, my shopping experience as an Apple user had been flawless, absolutely nothing to say at all.

These first four articles, though, show a worrying trend.

Configuration experience: 4 / 10 — I wanted the possibility to get more unified memory without selling a leg and an arm, but I was not given that. Until someone knowledgeable analyses these chips in detail and explains why 48 and 64 GB were not an option for the base M3 Max or the M3 Pro models, I will keep thinking this is still their money-grabbing upgrade mechanism playing its tricks on customers.

Ordering experience: 4 / 10 — I would’ve given a 2, but I am upping this because of partial responsibility from my bank.

Post-sale support: 2 / 10 — Support was supposed to be what distinguished Apple from the others. Spending 6 hours on the phone to be allowed to pay almost five thousand euros is not acceptable. Of course, no one will ever be held accountable for this, regardless of how much we complain because that’s the way of the world.

Fetching experience: 6 / 10 — this was barely sufficient because of the lack of training in the Apple Store’s staff. The availability of bags, the lack of care for my box and of bags did the rest. If I choose “store pick-up” in the future, I will choose another one. Luckily, there are two more nearby.

Bottom Line

As you can imagine from reading these first four episodes, I am quite disappointed by the experience so far, and I hope the improvements this machine will bring to my workflow will offset that. There is only one way I can conclude this: for this amount of money, for this kind of premium products, you—Apple—should have fared much better than this, and have trained us to expect nothing but perfection from you. You need to be flawless, immaculate, or be ready to offer compensations to the damaged customers.

Sadly, no one will ever compensate me for this, and I will probably even be pointed at because I am not being an enthusiast about Apple’s “green” efforts.

In the next episode I will start going through the unboxing and configuration of this new, hopefully shiny, Mac!

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