After less than 10 months, the power adapter for my Mac Book Pro decided to quit working. I was alerted to this fact last week when my Mac suddenly made the low battery sound (under an XP VM), which I thought was odd since I had the power adapter plugged in. Well the light on the power adapter was off, which I had only seen before when it wasn’t plugged into the Mac. I felt the white box part of the adapter and it was pretty dang hot. So a let it cool off and tried it again – nada. I gave it one more shot with the 2 prong plug on the adapter instead of the 3 prong cord, but still nothing. I then grabbed the Mac Book adapter from my son’s Mac and it began charging my Mac, although probably a little slower than normal (60W vs. 85W for the MBP adapter).
I finally called for help last night (I’ve been trying to get over a nasty cold for a week) and I started with Best Buy since I had a service plan through them for the Mac. After talking with a nice Indian man, he let me know that I needed to speak with Apple since the Mac was still under the original manufacturer’s warranty period. He was even nice enough to give me Apple’s number.
So I called Apple and talked to a support rep who, after I gave him my name and serial number (for the Mac of course), informed me that my warranty was up in 2 months and my phone support had ended 250+ days ago (I guess he must get a lot of people calling with no phone support or something). “But I just need a replacement power adapter,” I said. So he got some more information from me, then tried to sell me an Apple support plan (at least he asked me if I had one through BB first) because, with an Apple support plan you get unlimited phone support or something (I didn’t want to tell the guy that, being a somewhat successful computer professional, the only time I would be calling would be for a hardware problem, like this one. For all I know though, maybe they charge you to troubleshoot that stuff too). Luckily I had done all of the troubleshooting for him. I informed him of all of my steps and success with another adapter. He told me they had some battery department that handled my type of call, but then came back from hold and said he would take care of it for me (battery dept. probably told him that since I had already done all of the troubleshooting, they wouldn’t be needed for this call). Anyway, he informed me about the usual swap deal where I had to give them a credit card to ctb in case I didn’t send back the bad part. We went through the drill and he said I would be receiving an email with all of the particulars (which I did shortly thereafter).
Lesson here is, always do as much troubleshooting yourself first and your support calls will (usually) go much faster. Overall I was fine with both support people since BB went out of their way to give me Apple’s number an Apple took care of me pretty quickly. Kudos all around.