I had a little argument with one of my parents about a certain Linus Tech Tips video that compared the customer support of certain pre-built PC sellers. They simulated a stick of RAM becoming slightly dislodged during shipping, preventing the computer from powering on. Then they got one of their less-versed employees on the line with the PC’s respective phone number. The guy at the desk at the computer store down the road solved it in 10 minutes, while Dell had the poor LTT employee getting whiplash from being transferred between every Indian call center worker with a pulse, while constantly being pestered about extended warranty and whatnot, for 45 minutes. I made the point that I would not buy from Dell after seeing the state of their customer support, but my parent did not seem to be able to imagine a customer support line that wasn’t outsourced to the other side of the planet.
Ironically one of the reasons I was buying macs in the mid to late aughts was the apple store combined with apple care. I knew that if there was anything I could not handle I just had to go there and it would be taken care of. I stopped doing macs when they reversed course when the apple stored told us power cord fraying was our fault and they would not fix/replace along with going from high powered machines with tons of ports to minimalist designs that got rid of everything but touchscreens (or so it felt).
As bad as they are in that way (and many others), I can only consider Dell or Lenovo for mainstream laptops. They are the only manufacturers, to my knowledge, that make service manuals readily available or at least easy to obtain.
If it’s not a terminal or expensive fault, I’d just rather fix it myself than deal with customer support anyway - even in warranty.
Where I am, it is the retailers problem to solve up to 2 years from purchase. This covers the terminal cases.
For desktops I’ll just build myself, and make a point to offer builds to fridnds & family in the market.
a customer support line that wasn’t outsourced to the other side of the planet
Onshore support is indeed a bloody rarity these days.
I had a little argument with one of my parents about a certain Linus Tech Tips video that compared the customer support of certain pre-built PC sellers. They simulated a stick of RAM becoming slightly dislodged during shipping, preventing the computer from powering on. Then they got one of their less-versed employees on the line with the PC’s respective phone number. The guy at the desk at the computer store down the road solved it in 10 minutes, while Dell had the poor LTT employee getting whiplash from being transferred between every Indian call center worker with a pulse, while constantly being pestered about extended warranty and whatnot, for 45 minutes. I made the point that I would not buy from Dell after seeing the state of their customer support, but my parent did not seem to be able to imagine a customer support line that wasn’t outsourced to the other side of the planet.
Ironically one of the reasons I was buying macs in the mid to late aughts was the apple store combined with apple care. I knew that if there was anything I could not handle I just had to go there and it would be taken care of. I stopped doing macs when they reversed course when the apple stored told us power cord fraying was our fault and they would not fix/replace along with going from high powered machines with tons of ports to minimalist designs that got rid of everything but touchscreens (or so it felt).
As bad as they are in that way (and many others), I can only consider Dell or Lenovo for mainstream laptops. They are the only manufacturers, to my knowledge, that make service manuals readily available or at least easy to obtain.
If it’s not a terminal or expensive fault, I’d just rather fix it myself than deal with customer support anyway - even in warranty.
Where I am, it is the retailers problem to solve up to 2 years from purchase. This covers the terminal cases.
For desktops I’ll just build myself, and make a point to offer builds to fridnds & family in the market.
Onshore support is indeed a bloody rarity these days.