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While Apple's customer service is supposedly great in the US, is plainly sucks in Germany as most people who had to use it will have to agree to. In early summer, my Powerbook had some problems with its screen, the partial repair of which caused many of its parts (including the mainboard) to be replaced and my hard drive to be lost by Apple. Recovering from that took over a month, daily phonecalls to their helpline and hours to restore my system into its previous state.
So I decided to send them a little rundown of their service's quality and the answer I received now is just in line with the quality of their service: After a brief apology I was basically told that there was no problem and that I should call their service number (again) if I had any more questions. Well done, Apple.
I don't like that. Too bad Apple can't be forced to give up their hardware monopoly and that Linux isn't quite as useable yet.
Of course another dark chapter of Apple's customer friendlyness is the upcoming decease of the neat iTools. Not only are Apple trying to rip us off by charging for full-blown services which most people probably neither need nor want but also you see all that new '.mac' stuff creeping into the iApps. Sure, iCal probably supports any WebDAV server, but who without an iDisk actually has access to one. Very few compared to those with FTP accounts, I'd say. The same kind of virtual software crippeling seems to be true for the upcoming iSync and nobody would be surprised if new '.mac' menu items will keep appearing throughout the OSX system and iApps. This is clearly to make people feel they 'miss out' without one of these accounts - it surely wouldn't be a lot of effort not to clutter the menus with the correspoding menu items if the user doesn't have a '.mac' account.
Oh, and The Joy of Tech are running a nice cartoon on that dreaded topic today.