1 star for Encore Technologies as a whole, the rest of the stars go to the employee who initially assisted me. I think the decent employee's name was Tim, maybe? Anyway, we nerded out over Game of Thrones and he was cool.
First of all, Apple has screwed all their customers out of decent customer service when something goes wrong with their machines. Not this place's fault, I guess, other than it justifies their predatory existence? Second, Apple will convince you that your only option is to go to a place like this, an "authorized Apple dealer." That's not your only option, however. You can go straight to the Apple Store anyway. Third, if you are lucky, this place can help fix your machine. If you are not, they'll charge you a diagnostic fee to tell you what you already knew was wrong with your computer before you even walked into their stupid store (if you happen to have had it happen multiply times already, like I did, you're pretty much triple screwed, and not in the fun way). If you're also out of luck, Encore will keep your machine for over a week just to do nothing to it, but charge you a "diagnostic fee" anyway. Please, you didn't diagnose a damn thing. I already told you what was wrong with it, and you could have just told me from the start that my very expensive Macbook Pro was essentially now a brick. It would have saved me time, effort, and I would have gladly suffered the indignity of a trip to the Apple Store. Instead, I was without a functioning computer for over a week and charged for the inconvenience of it all.
Nice employee told me over the phone that Encore would help with data migration. But when I went to pick up the computer, the guy behind the counter didn't seem interested in that, so I just said I'd figure it out myself. Good thing I actually backed the computer up days before it died and know how to perform data migration since this other guy didn't seem to give half a fart about being helpful. Remind me again what I was paying for here? Oh, right, a waste of time, inconvenience, and basically having my laptop held ransom for over a week. Yeah, yeah, first world problems and one star worth of them, at that. read more