Does the Genius Bar tell the whole story?
If you spill liquid on your Macbook Air and it won’t turn on, the Apple Genius Bar will tell you the laptop should be replaced and the data irretrievable. I’d expect an answer like this from a New Jersey used car salesman. But from an Apple ‘Genius’?
Why does Apple say the laptop is dead? I spoke with an Apple employee at the Palo Alto store last Thursday. He said that if a laptop is damaged from liquid, Apple has an all-or-nothing policy: you pay (nearly) the price of a new machine to get a new logic board, keyboard and trackpad. And because it costs the price of a new laptop to replace everything, Apple says you’re better off buying a new laptop.
Problem? If you spilled liquid on just the keyboard, it’s possible only the keyboard is damaged. But the power button on the latest generation of Macbooks is integrated into the keyboard. So it might be that the rest of the computer is fine, even though you can’t turn it on. It turns out keyboards aren’t hard to replace for ~$250. Much cheaper than a new laptop.
Why does Apple say the solid-state drive is irretrievable? Because Apple won’t retrieve it. It is actually very easy to retrieve. How? Borrow your friend’s Macbook Air. Take out your friend’s harddrive. Insert your own harddrive. Download the data onto an external harddrive. Follow these instructions. Voila. It’s against Apple’s terms of service to put your data on a machine that doesn’t belong to you–and because they won’t do the procedure, they tell you it can’t be done. (Alternately you may be lucky–take out the battery and plug in the laptop and sometimes it boots up just fine.)
I asked the Apple employee why the Genius Bar won’t tell you all this. His answer: It’s the responsibility of the customer to do the research–wasn’t really an answer at all. Which still leaves the question unanswered.
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