Screw you, otbader!
Yesterday Patrick's newly-acquired-via-ebay Macbook Pro arrived, after he won the bid on it on Monday night. It was coming from San Jose, so the two-day turnaround time, though pleasant, was hardly unexpected.
When the laptop arrives, I take it out of the box, and am a little dismayed to see the poor packing job the seller had done. I mean, this is a LAPTOP for crying out loud, yet it was packed in such a way that it was quite literally rattling around inside the box, buffered only by a couple of those bubble-wrap-on-the-inside envelopes.
I open it up and discover that it's DIRTY, granted it's a used laptop so I'm not expecting perfection but jeeze man would it have KILLED you to like, wipe it down and take a can of compressed air to the keyboard? blech!
I snap a couple photos of the dirty monitor and whatnot, then hit the power button.... it does the classic Apple hardware "booong!" sound, and then.... nothing. Nothing shows up on the screen for a good 20 seconds, and then..... a file folder icon with a "?" inside.
I take a picture, and send it to Patrick at work. He's the Mac guy, not me. I know NOTHING about MacOS besides how to use the GUI aspect of it.
He calls me and has me try a couple different things, none of which works. He guesses that the guy just forgot to actually install any operating system on the machine after wiping the hard drive, and is annoyed at the fact that there are no OS discs in the package like we were promised.
Not that big a deal though, we already HAVE some MacOS discs, so though it's a hassle, it's nothing more than an inconvenience. Patrick sends the guy an email notifying him that we GOT the laptop, but that there were no discs or remote in the box. The seller responds that he forgot the discs, and doesn't have the remote, "nor was it listed on the auction page". Thing is though, that's one of the factory accessories with this machine. It'd be common courtesy to mention if you DON'T have the remote anymore, because the average bear is likely to figure that the laptop comes with all the factory accessories, unless otherwise stated.
So fast-forward a couple hours to when Patrick gets home, and is fiddling with his new laptop... only to determine that there's something wrong with the hard drive. We can hear it spinning up, but the machine is saying "Uhhh... Hey dude, I don't have a hard drive? There's something pulling power that might BE a hard drive, but I can't talk to it so I'm not certain of what it is?"
Frak.
So we go to Fry's Electronics (thank GOD we live just down the road from that place again!) and pick up a few specialty screwdrivers that Patrick will need to take the damn laptop apart. The seller said the warranty expired 4 months ago so we're not concerned about voiding that, and Patrick thinks that the problem is just that the SATA cable has jiggled loose in shipping, due no doubt to the seller's SHITTY packaging.
Took it apart, lo and behold, the cable is loose. Much swearing ensues from my kitchen, along with a comical quote of "Hurray cake spatulas! I don't need no special Apple tool!" So Patrick fixes the fiddly little cable, after having to take out about 15-20 screws from the thing, puts it back together, and starts messing with it more. He's going to reinstall the OS because he doesn't care to deal with whatever the seller might've decided to install on the "clean install with a user account in Patrick's name set up."
Hmm. Hard drive is saying it's got bad sectors. Run a repair utility, seems to fix it, but....
Now the hard drive is acting squirrely. Remember folks, this is a laptop computer. But having it on your lap, and moving your feet or anything else that causes the machine to move AT ALL causes the motherboard/hard drive to freak out and spin down the hard drive. (for those not in the know, all new-ish Apple laptops have an accellerometer on the motherboard that detects sudden movements of the hardware, and stops the hard drive from spinning, to prevent your hard drive from being scrambled should your laptop take a tumble of any sort.) Hrm.
Further sleuthing comes up with an interesting error code in System Profiler that indicates that the motherboard inside this machine is NOT from the Apple factory, as it's not flashed properly. Hrm. If that's been replaced, what else has been, and WHY?
If the seller had taken this machine to an Apple store for all its work, the motherboard would be flashed properly and wouldn't be giving an error code. The fact that it's NOT indicates that he took it to some random computer store for some kind of repairs.
So Patrick sends the guy a blistering email, because at this point the laptop is NOT what we were told we were buying, and we're very unhappy customers. The guy wrote back this morning (4 times, in fact! in the course of an hour) with several different stories, with his final tune being that he'll give us back $800 when we send him the laptop back. We paid $825.
Now we get to try and figure out how we can safely get all of our money back, by calling Ebay and PayPal. This guy lied about the condition of the laptop, and is now saying that he won't give us a partial refund until we ship our only bargaining chip back to him at our own expense, even though when he shipped it to US he already had our money, as we'd already paid, per the standard operating procedures of Ebay.
I'm off to the Apple store in a bit, to have the guys at the Genius bar take a look at the laptop and do some diagnostics on it, so we'll have verifiable and authenticable proof that the machine is broken in such a way as to be apparent that it was shipped to us in this condition, not just damaged in transit. If we can prove that, I think we have a pretty good case with Ebay and PayPal for getting ALL of our money back, and making the seller pay for us to ship his crappy laptop back to him.
Overall, I have a feeling that this is the last time we're ever going to buy anything worth more than $50 on Ebay, unless it's car parts. Those seem to be exempt from the plethora of scammers that lie in wait for some unsuspecting customer to stroll by with good intentions of, you know, buying something.
When the laptop arrives, I take it out of the box, and am a little dismayed to see the poor packing job the seller had done. I mean, this is a LAPTOP for crying out loud, yet it was packed in such a way that it was quite literally rattling around inside the box, buffered only by a couple of those bubble-wrap-on-the-inside envelopes.
I open it up and discover that it's DIRTY, granted it's a used laptop so I'm not expecting perfection but jeeze man would it have KILLED you to like, wipe it down and take a can of compressed air to the keyboard? blech!
I snap a couple photos of the dirty monitor and whatnot, then hit the power button.... it does the classic Apple hardware "booong!" sound, and then.... nothing. Nothing shows up on the screen for a good 20 seconds, and then..... a file folder icon with a "?" inside.
I take a picture, and send it to Patrick at work. He's the Mac guy, not me. I know NOTHING about MacOS besides how to use the GUI aspect of it.
He calls me and has me try a couple different things, none of which works. He guesses that the guy just forgot to actually install any operating system on the machine after wiping the hard drive, and is annoyed at the fact that there are no OS discs in the package like we were promised.
Not that big a deal though, we already HAVE some MacOS discs, so though it's a hassle, it's nothing more than an inconvenience. Patrick sends the guy an email notifying him that we GOT the laptop, but that there were no discs or remote in the box. The seller responds that he forgot the discs, and doesn't have the remote, "nor was it listed on the auction page". Thing is though, that's one of the factory accessories with this machine. It'd be common courtesy to mention if you DON'T have the remote anymore, because the average bear is likely to figure that the laptop comes with all the factory accessories, unless otherwise stated.
So fast-forward a couple hours to when Patrick gets home, and is fiddling with his new laptop... only to determine that there's something wrong with the hard drive. We can hear it spinning up, but the machine is saying "Uhhh... Hey dude, I don't have a hard drive? There's something pulling power that might BE a hard drive, but I can't talk to it so I'm not certain of what it is?"
Frak.
So we go to Fry's Electronics (thank GOD we live just down the road from that place again!) and pick up a few specialty screwdrivers that Patrick will need to take the damn laptop apart. The seller said the warranty expired 4 months ago so we're not concerned about voiding that, and Patrick thinks that the problem is just that the SATA cable has jiggled loose in shipping, due no doubt to the seller's SHITTY packaging.
Took it apart, lo and behold, the cable is loose. Much swearing ensues from my kitchen, along with a comical quote of "Hurray cake spatulas! I don't need no special Apple tool!" So Patrick fixes the fiddly little cable, after having to take out about 15-20 screws from the thing, puts it back together, and starts messing with it more. He's going to reinstall the OS because he doesn't care to deal with whatever the seller might've decided to install on the "clean install with a user account in Patrick's name set up."
Hmm. Hard drive is saying it's got bad sectors. Run a repair utility, seems to fix it, but....
Now the hard drive is acting squirrely. Remember folks, this is a laptop computer. But having it on your lap, and moving your feet or anything else that causes the machine to move AT ALL causes the motherboard/hard drive to freak out and spin down the hard drive. (for those not in the know, all new-ish Apple laptops have an accellerometer on the motherboard that detects sudden movements of the hardware, and stops the hard drive from spinning, to prevent your hard drive from being scrambled should your laptop take a tumble of any sort.) Hrm.
Further sleuthing comes up with an interesting error code in System Profiler that indicates that the motherboard inside this machine is NOT from the Apple factory, as it's not flashed properly. Hrm. If that's been replaced, what else has been, and WHY?
If the seller had taken this machine to an Apple store for all its work, the motherboard would be flashed properly and wouldn't be giving an error code. The fact that it's NOT indicates that he took it to some random computer store for some kind of repairs.
So Patrick sends the guy a blistering email, because at this point the laptop is NOT what we were told we were buying, and we're very unhappy customers. The guy wrote back this morning (4 times, in fact! in the course of an hour) with several different stories, with his final tune being that he'll give us back $800 when we send him the laptop back. We paid $825.
Now we get to try and figure out how we can safely get all of our money back, by calling Ebay and PayPal. This guy lied about the condition of the laptop, and is now saying that he won't give us a partial refund until we ship our only bargaining chip back to him at our own expense, even though when he shipped it to US he already had our money, as we'd already paid, per the standard operating procedures of Ebay.
I'm off to the Apple store in a bit, to have the guys at the Genius bar take a look at the laptop and do some diagnostics on it, so we'll have verifiable and authenticable proof that the machine is broken in such a way as to be apparent that it was shipped to us in this condition, not just damaged in transit. If we can prove that, I think we have a pretty good case with Ebay and PayPal for getting ALL of our money back, and making the seller pay for us to ship his crappy laptop back to him.
Overall, I have a feeling that this is the last time we're ever going to buy anything worth more than $50 on Ebay, unless it's car parts. Those seem to be exempt from the plethora of scammers that lie in wait for some unsuspecting customer to stroll by with good intentions of, you know, buying something.