mariuszciesla.com | Mariusz Cieśla

So, I decided to buy myself a new Macbook. For a while I planned the old MB Pro, but since the new laptop should be a good replacement for my home PC, I decided to wait for new ones because they were supposed to have nVidia’s 9xxx chips. So they arrived. I have money, I know which one I want (13.3″ 2.4G version with 4 gigs of RAM) but… yeah… I live in Poland.

What’s wrong with it? Apparently, a big chunk of our beautiful continent of Europe is eligible to buy their Macs in some Apple Store. Still, for some reason in my country where I know lots of people having Macs or interested in getting one, Apple support is a disaster. We have our beautiful “authorized reseller”, we can buy our Macs in something called iSpots or in stores that have been given “blessing” of the reseller (Cortland, RCS2 etc.). When after Polish premiere of new Macbook I called iSpot to know if I can get one, they said “No”. So I asked why. They said they don’t have them and they don’t know when they will. Hello? I think they started already and should be available, right? Apparently not. Not mentioning the fact that even with available Macbook, getting a custom one (with for example more RAM on board) can be up to month of waiting.

Pricing at the reseller? Well, this list shows that price of a 17-inch Macbook Pro in Poland is the highest in the world. We even beat Norway and Sweden, which have one of the highest wages in the Europe. That’s not really nice, especially considering the fact that I earn around 10% of a typical Norwegian wage (I worked a bit with a Norwegian company, so I have quite a good comparison).

And what about customer support for the users that already managed to wait in a month-long line and got their brand new Mac? If something goes wrong, of course, you can turn it in to the service. No problem. If your SuperDrive is down, you’ll pay half of new Mac Mini price for it. If it’s just a minor issue, most probably they will send it to the Germany, where it will be fixed. This can be up to six weeks of waiting, from what I’ve heard so far. If that’s customer support, I’d rather be not supported at all and do everything by myself (including sending my computer to Germany).

So, again. Dear Apple, could you get us some proper customer here, on the east side of the iron curtain? I heard that the curtain is lifted now and we are a part of EU too.