Apple customer support sucks. I had a macbook air with a dead battery under warranty that I wanted to get replaced. It took a month of discussions with their customer support before the Apple Store (University Village) actually got the damn battery. And then to add insult to injury, the "genius" accused me of damaging the laptop with water and acted like he was doing me a favor by giving me the battery I was owed. I'm certain he was trying to scare me into buying a new computer.
The whole thing made me think back to my old thinkpad, for which I could perform a battery swap myself in seconds (plus two days for the battery to arrive in the mail.)
More recently, my Dell XPS 13 died while under warranty. After a three minute phonecall with Dell customer service, they had a perfectly polite repairman come to my home the next day to replace the motherboard.
I worked with an educational institution that did tons of apple devices.
AppleCare claims were pretty frequent given use case, and hassle free. I honestly haven't even HEARD of months long replacements. This was some time ago though so things may have changed, but something seems off.
My own experience was simply, how can apple be making money with this service?
I believe the cost is $6/month currently. Highly worth it if you are concerned about service.
Dell does a 16/month support offering, but limited to 2 years.
The whole thing made me think back to my old thinkpad, for which I could perform a battery swap myself in seconds (plus two days for the battery to arrive in the mail.)
More recently, my Dell XPS 13 died while under warranty. After a three minute phonecall with Dell customer service, they had a perfectly polite repairman come to my home the next day to replace the motherboard.