Driss-A-Blog

To briefly recap, the trackpad on my black MacBook died a few weeks ago. It's a $60 part if you buy it on eBay, so I figured that I was in luck. But it turned out that during a warranty repair that Apple did 2½ years ago, they stripped several screws essential to getting the laptop apart.

Today I visited several hardware stores, and they looked at it and said that they had nothing in stock that would remove screws that small.

I visited Tekserve, and they said that the only thing that they could do was charge me $130 for standard labor to take the thing apart. If I wanted them to put in the top case, that'd be $150 more.

I went to the Apple store. The manager couldn't help me. If I'd noticed the damage earlier (which I had) and brought it to their attention (which I didn't) perhaps something could have been done, but now it's too late. They have two labor fees (normal and “hard”) which are $80 and $140 (I was surprised to find they were cheaper than Tekserve).

So, due to Apple's bungling of a warranty repair, my $60 do-it-yourself repair has turned into a $200-300 deal. What's the moral of the story? When you get a computer, and when you entrust it to anyone for repair (especially the manufacturer), strip it apart and double-check that they haven't botched anything.

Joy.

[18 Feb followup: Tekserve was able to help.]