So, this past Christmas my beautiful, wonder wife finally caved to my persistence and bought me an iPhone. Without comparison, its been the best phone I’ve ever owned. It really is amazing, I can’t even imagine having to use any other phone now that I’ve owned an iPhone.

All of that is exactly why it was so painful the other day when I noticed that the earpiece volume button on the side of the phone had broken off. I could no longer adjust the volume of the earpiece or the speakerphone. This really needed to get fixed.

So, I took it in to the local Apple Store to have them take a look at it, after having to setup an appointment with their “Genius Bar”. I still think its kind of a hassle to have to setup an appointment to get technical support for a problem, but I guess its just the way they do business. Not that big of a deal really, just something to keep in mind.

One thing that I will definitely say needs to be improved with regards to their process for customer support for iPhones: they NEED to figure out a method of being able to transfer data from one phone to another when they encounter situations in which they need to replace a customer’s phone. I had a whole bunch of data on my phone that I hadn’t backed up in about a week, and the only way I could retain that data was to go back home, backup my phone, and setup *another* appointment at the store to go back in and have my phone replaced. All because they don’t have a good means of transferring data from one phone to another. Nearly every other cell phone in the world on any carrier has the ability to do this, there’s no good reason that I can think of that a company like Apple with the best phone on the market can’t figure out a way to be able to do this for their customers. But…I digress…

So I went home, got my phone backed up, and headed back the store a second time. This time, they replaced my phone and all was well with the world…Until the next morning.

The next morning, my new (refurbished…yet another pet peave…its ridiculous to me a phone that I just paid full price for less than six months ago gets replaced with a used/rebuilt/refurbished one, and I let them know it too…but again, I digress…) phone just stops working, out of the blue. Some random error messages that mean nothing to me, other than the fact that I can’t use my phone anymore, flashing on the screen. Another trip to the “Genius Bar”. Fun stuff…

So, they replaced this new phone with another refurbished one. I bring it home, restore all of my data again, and all is well…finally (after half of my beautiful weekend has been wasted inside the Apple store).

Fast forward to this evening…

Phoenix is running around the house in an unusually good mood, and I wanted to capture that beautiful smile of his with the camera on my phone. So I pull it out of my pocket and fire up the camer….huh? Nothing but random colored bars dancing across the screen in my camera viewport. What the #$%@!! At this point, I wanted to be really furious, but thats something I’ve been working on lately, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The guy that gave me my *second* refurbished phone was the “Head Genius” at the store, and told me to call and ask for him directly if I had any other problems with this phone (apparently this kind of thing is “extremely rare”…imagine my luck!). So, I gave him a call. I told him about the problems I was having with the camera function on my “new” phone, and he told me he’d call me back later and let me know what he could do.

He called me back a little bit ago. I was very pleased with what he had to say. After talking over my situation with “the powers that be” he said that he had obtained approval to go ahead and get my phone replaced with a brand new one.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate that, despite the fact that there has been some hassle in getting to this point, this company (Apple) at least knows when enough is enough and handles a situation by taking care of the customer. Thats a LOT more than I can say for other companies I’ve dealt with. Its the kind of customer support that has earned Apple a loyal customer in me.