Apple Premium Service Provider
There is no official Apple presence1 in Greece. As a result, there are no mail orders, no mail-in option to repair and you have to rely to a 3rd party to service your Apple Hardware.
About 2 months ago, I noticed that the battery on the MacBook Pro (Retina 15-inch, Late 2013) had swollen. I took it to an Apple Premium Service Provider in Greece where I was told that the issue is indeed the battery and would need to be replaced at a cost of €341,81 (€215.33 for the battery plus €126.48 labour cost).
I agreed to the service. After all, the MacBook has a 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 and 512GB SSD PCIe 2.0. It still holds up pretty well to do development so the cost of €340 is minimal compared to the value I get out of it.
As soon as I got the Macbook back, it started to shutdown at random times. The screen would go dark (with some light illuminating), the fans would start to spin and eventually it would shut down. Upon powering it on again, there was never a Panic Report but only once; in the tens of shutdowns.
panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f928da528): “ino 37945100 no extent covering dstream alloced_size 806912 (fsize 805656) pos/len 868809:0\n”@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/apfs/apfs-945.275.7/nx/jobj.c:11881
Every hardware diagnostic run by the service provider came back green.
Eventually, it took me 2 months to finally get the engineering team at Apple to trace2 it to a faulty logic board (error 128 they said 🤷🏽♂️).
Update
Apparently, you can use log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' to check the shutdown cause.
End Update
I was referred back to the service provider. I am now told, a replacement3 logic board will cost about ~€750. At a total price of €1090 to repair the MacBook Pro, repairing it doesn’t sound as appealing or worth.
Other than the fact that I cannot afford a new MacBook Pro right now, the bitter taste left in my mouth is directly related to the relationship that Apple has with service providers in a country like Greece.
You see, the tools provided to the service provider gave no indication of a faulty motherboard4. As a result, I ended up paying €340 only to end up with a Mac that will randomly shutdown. As far as I am concerned, prior to the battery replacement, the MacBook Pro worked as expected. I am now €340 lighter and have a faulty MacBook Pro.
Keep in mind that a service provider is an independent, 3rd party. The manager doesn’t have the luxury, the privilege nor the overall profits of Apple to take the hit or provide leeway.
And here is where I take issue with the service options offered by Apple in Greece. The service provider does not have all the required tools to make an overall assessment which in this case has cost me.
In the end, this arrangement is a mark against the reputation of Apple. For Apple to take pride in customer satisfaction in Greece, it must take all the necessary steps to have an Apple Store in Athens.
Update
I have now bought the software listed in one of the related links below. At $10 is a low risk to take. I will report back once I have used the Mac for some time.
Related
- MacBook Pro 15" Retina mid 2014 random shutdowns
- Are OS X shutdown cause and sleep cause numbers listed/explained anywhere?
- Shutdown Cause -128
-
No Apple Retail Stores, no option to trade-in, no Today at Apple, etc. ↩︎
-
Long story short, after getting in touch with Apple Care, I was sent a “Capture Data” app which performs a “Sysdiagnose” with “Full Disk Access”. ↩︎
-
Since the MacBook Pro is now considered Vintage, a replacement logic board is not guaranteed to be available. ↩︎
-
Even if I assume that the faulty logic board is a result of the swollen battery, I don’t quite understand why as a customer I have to bare that cost too. ↩︎