Think again.

I found this as I was Googling around for information about Apple’s repair service since my hard drive died again, less than 6 months after Apple replaced it. Interestingly enough, after they replaced my hard drive in March, the laptop has been very hot and completely unusable on my lap. I can only assume the “new” hard drive they put in was causing this.

Anyway, one morning while I was in the US this summer, my MacBook just wouldn’t boot OS X. I got a gray screen, no Apple logo or anything, just a gray screen. After about 5 minutes or so, a folder with a question mark on it starts flashing. I know enough about OS X to know that it means my hard drive is toast. And this is a few days before I head off to university and life in the dorms. And this is also about 2 months after my 1 year warranty with Apple ended. What a bitch.

I bought my MacBook at a large electronics retailer in Hong Kong called Fortress. When I bought it I was offered an “extended warranty” for 3 years from Fortress. It was slightly cheaper than AppleCare and in a spur of the moment I went along with it. Now it looks as though I will have to make use of this warranty. Basically, the way it works is I go to an Apple Authorized Service Provider, get my MacBook fixed there and pay for the repair, then send the receipt from the AASP to Fortress who will reimburse the full cost of the repair. Or so I hope.

So I called up the local Apple service center and asked them for an approximate cost of repair of the hard drive. What the woman told me almost made me laugh. They were going to charge 600 HKD (75 USD) for “inspection by an engineer” and the cost of the actual hard drive will be 2000 - 3000 HKD (250 - 375 USD)! We’re talking about an ordinary 5400rpm 120gb 2.5″ hard drive here! Something worth at most 75 USD!

But that’s not all. This “new” hard drive could well be a refurbished hard drive, in other words, something that can fail again in a few months. In fact, I opened up my MacBook yesterday, took out the hard drive and had the great pleasure of finding out that the Hitachi drive they put in there 6 months ago was in fact refurbished!

This is blasphemy! This is madness!

No, actually it’s just Apple. So not only are customers shelling out unworldly amounts of cash for a simple hard drive repair but they are not necessarily even getting a NEW hard drive!

Now had I not bought this Fortress extended warranty, I would’ve made a quick trip to a local computer store and picked up a 200 gig drive for 100 USD or something. But since I’ve already ended up paying for it, I am just going to have to take a crapshoot and hope that Fortress is true to their word and will actually reimburse the 400 USD I will have to fork over to Apple.

That’s it for now. Oh and be sure to visit my site again in 6 months when I write a similar article about getting a new hard drive…