I have given this place wayyyy too many chances. I originally found out about Mac Enthusiasts on Yelp as an option for Mac Repair near West LA and Santa Monica. Reading through the reviews, it looked like it would do the job, though they’d probably jack the prices way up. I decided to go with it.
My Powerbook G4 had minor water damage in the screen. I’d been using it for a year and a half with no issues at all, I just decided one day that I had some extra money, let’s get a new screen. I’d like to state again that I’d been using this computer for about a year and a half after the water damage and it worked perfectly fine.
I brought my computer to Mac Enthusiasts on Pico, and talked with the too-many-pot-brownies clerk about the replacement. I was aware that a new screen would be expensive, but he quoted close to $1000. Whatever, I was new in town at the time, I couldn’t find any other Mac repair stores around the West LA area, I went for it. In a few days time I’d be back online and I’d forget all about that big gash in my checking account.
As I’ve seen noted on both Yelp and Citysearch, a few days to these burnouts is over a week. And most of the time they will not call you. I haven’t encountered customer service this bad outside of a call to Time Warner Cable. Not to mention that the hours at this place are awful.. 9-6 M-F and then 10-4 on Saturdays. Meaning unless you can wait until Saturday to get your computer back, you have to take time off from work just to get there.
So a week goes by, I call them every day to see when it’s going to ready, I’m convinced that if I didn’t keep calling them it would have taken at least two weeks to replace the screen. Finally they tell me it’s ready so I duck out of work early to pick it up. When I get home I open it up, it’s beautiful, no water damage on the screen, it’s great, well worth the money..? NO. When I closed my Powerbook, it remained awake/lit up. What the hell was going on here? As any Powerbook user would know, when you close the book, it immediately goes to sleep. This was not happening. I called them back immediately and they transferred me to the technician that worked on my Powerbook. He had me run through my sleep settings and nothing worked. I brought the Powerbook back for them to look at, which they kept for another 3 days and didn’t call. In the end, they said they didn’t know what was wrong, but for an additional charge they could figure out what is wrong and repair it.
An additional charge? WHAT? After charging me a crazy amount of money, they wanted to milk some more repair money out of me for something THEY BROKE? I called and refused the additional repair and asked for a refund. I’m pretty sure I was talking to the brownie guy at this point, but he transferred me to the infamous Mark who apparently a lot of people have had bad experiences with. I told him I wanted a discount for my repair since they somehow caused my computer’s sleep function to stop working while repairing my computer. He told me that they would refund anything, and that the sleep function malfunction was probably due to the water damage. The water damage that was just on the screen and had not affected the computer in a year and a half. He became very defensive on the phone and in the end told me that he would give me $90 in store credit. This did not satisfy me at all, but it was the most I could get out of Mark. I considered taking them to small claims court, but figured it was not worth the hassle. To this day my sleep function does not work properly.
Months passed, and my Powerbook adapter stopped working. I decided to go to Mac Enthusiasts to redeem my $90 store credit. I called to make sure they carried adapters and to make sure that my store credit was in the system. As I assumed, there was no note of my store credit at all. When I provided them with great detail about the situation, my store credit magically appeared.
When I arrived and asked to see the adapters, they showed me the Apple adapters they carried. The Apple adapters were unpackaged, and thrown into a plastic bin. I knew just looking at them that there was a slim chance that they would last any decent amount of time. They told me about a third party adapter they had that was only $25. The brownie guy actually encouraged me to buy the non-Apple adapter as it was cheaper and worked the same. I, wanting to use up my store credit, went with the Apple adapter.
I returned home with the Apple adapter, and plugged it into my Powerbook, only to find that the adapter did not work. Big surprise here. I called right back and told them that I was going to return to the store within 10 minutes to exchange the adapter (they were closing.) I arrived at Mac Enthusiasts and knocked on the chained up gate. Some guys told me that I had to go around. There I am, with my Powerbook under my arm, walking down Pico, then turning the corner and walking down a dark alley. I knock on the back door, a short, dark haired worker (effeminate, headset-wearing guy, I think this might be Mark) takes my computer into the other room, tries the adapter, realizes it doesn’t work, gives me another one, it works, I leave, down the dark alley with my computer under my arm.
26 days go by and the adapter stops working. I’m in a good mood this time, and while I should really just head to the Apple Store and get an out-of-the-box adapter, I decide to take it back to Mac Enthusiasts, as they shouldn’t be selling products that stop working within a month. I get to the store and brownie guys says “I’m out of those.” He shows me the $25 third party adapters again and I say, sure I’ll go with that.
Now me, being a rational, and let’s say business-savvy person, ASSUME that I’ll return this broken Apple adapter, they’ll give me the $25 adapter, and I’ll get the difference as either cash back or store credit. NOT THE CASE! Brownie guy tells me that I can either buy the adapter from them for $25 or I can bring the Apple adapter to the Apple Store and “see if they’ll exchange it” for me. You see, I couldn’t exchange the Apple adapter that I bought at Mac Enthusiasts, even though I had just exchanged it 26 days earlier. These people need to get on the same page.
I went ahead and bought the $25 adapter, knowing that I had work to do and no time to head to the Apple Store. I do plan on heading to the Apple Store in the near future, just so I can confirm that brownie guy knew very well that there’s no way in hell that I’m getting an exchange from Apple.
When I do talk to the people at the Apple Store, I will tell them that they should remove Mac Enthusiasts from their referral list. The customer service is awful, they will break your computer, they will act very unprofessionally, and hell, they don’t even push the Apple products. I just read on Yelp that Mac Enthusiasts’ lawyer is threatening people that post negative Yelp reviews. It seems that plenty of people are having issues with Mac Enthusiasts. I would avoid this place at all costs.
**Update** 3/22/08
Mac Enthusiasts has continued their bullying of Yelp.com, and all of the negative comments except one have been erased! Yelp can apparently be bought. I will contact them based on this issue and post my results.
Thank God Citysearch.comis keeping it real.
on Feb 5th, 2008
The reason the sleep doesn’t work anymore on your powerbook is that there is a magnet on the back of the LCD panel. If that magnet was not trasfered when the LCD was replaced then the machine does not know when the lid is closed. Having made this mistake once myself I know it is easy to overlook. I fixed my mistake for the customer for free and I would expect them to do the same.
on Feb 5th, 2008
well I’m definitely never going back there again. The fact that a Mac specialty store would overlook that, even after having extra time to look at it, shows how awful this place is. If you have other suggestions for other local Mac repair places I’ll add them.
on Feb 5th, 2008
Sorry Ryan, I’m on the wrong side of the US to be able to advise you. All I can say is that it is more important to find a good tech vs. a store. I would reccomend a small, non-chain, mac authorized shop. I used to work for one associated with a college bookstore. We did a high volume with little staff so we had to get good quick. Ultimately it comes down to finding the right technician. Any monkey with a screwdriver can replace a part in a PC but it takes the hands of a true craftsman to fix a Mac correctly. Even if you take it to a large shop and get good service once it doesn’t mean that the same tech will be looking at it next time. FYI if you still have your old LCD from the repair there is a good chance the magnet is still on it.
on Feb 5th, 2008
Unfortunately, the scam artists at Mac Enthusiasts kept my old lcd. Is that something you can buy online? The magnet that is.
on Feb 5th, 2008
You probably will be able to. You can deffinitely get it from any certified Apple repair center. Should run under $20. The thing about it is the installation will cost you more as you have to remove the back panel of the display and that (depending if you have a removable ariport card or not) requires just about everything to be removed from the laptop. Did i mention that i’m glad to not be repairing them anymore?
on Feb 5th, 2008
I’ve also only had bad experiences with this place. They don’t know what they’re doing.
on Mar 5th, 2008
to the OP - just curious, did you ever check out Mac Solutions, being that you’re in WLA? They are on 11933 Wilshire Blvd. They used to be further west on Wilshire in Santa Monica back in the 90’s, I preferred the SM location since there was a big metered parking lot in the back of the store, and their current location is a pain in the ass to get in and out of. But they repair all macs, though a little on the pricey side. Back in the 90’s they were one of the few places in all of SoCal doing Mac repairs. They worked on three of macs back in the day, never had a problem with them. I can do all this stuff myself nowadays, so I don’t need their services, but you might want to check them out. Google for their website.
on Mar 7th, 2008
Thanks for the tip John.. my laptop is currently staying with Computech on the corner of National and Motor. We’ll see how that works out. They took a look at the shoddy work Mac Enthusiasts did as far as hinging a new screen on (which is on crooked causing the screen to fall back or forward.) and they couldn’t believe it. I’ve heard more stories about how Matt (the manager at Mac Enthusiasts) is a crook and really does rip people off. I told the Apple Store at Century City that Mac Enthusiasts does really shoddy work and they gave me a knowing look like “yeah sorry to hear that.” Hopefully they take Mac Enthusiasts off the list.. hell when I went to Mac Enthusiasts they even convinced me to NOT get an Apple adapter and go with the third party on instead. There should be no solid relationship there.
on Apr 18th, 2008
[...] report about some alleged Hollywood Romance when it has much better things to comment on like the subpar service at West LA’s Mac Enthusiasts or the crazy angry guys that work at Samy’s Camera in Culver City? (we’ll get to [...]
on Apr 23rd, 2008
Mac Enthusiasts was horrible 10 years ago, I’ve never been in there since. keep spreading the word. Also, another possibility for the sleep thing. I have a powerbook (G4/867Mhz) that will not sleep if I upgrade the OS past 10.2.8 — If I do, I’d have to reinstall from the disks & downloads back up to 10.2.6 then it would sleep again. never found anyone else w/ this problem and Apple never could figure out why it happens. haven’t gotten around to trying 10.4
on Apr 23rd, 2008
Thanks for stopping by Eric! Yeah it seems nothing good comes of that place. My Mac has officially died since, so I’m on the Thinkpad boat now. At least I’ll never have to set foot in this place again!
on May 26th, 2008
I am very surprised to read so many complains about Mac Enthusiasts because until now I heard onky good things about this store. After reading this I will be very carefull if I will have to buy something from that place.
on Jun 6th, 2008
I’ve had problems with them as well, over a G4 that I bought unknowingly from a techie who works there. The computer would crash during ProTools, and then fail to reboot. Eventually it stopped working altogether. The First time, the techie told me that the it had a virus, probably from the internet, although I didn’t have it hooked up to the internet at all. Two weeks later it was “fixed”. It booted again when I took it home, but the ProTools problem remained. After a few weeks, it stopped booting again. I call them up, take the computer in, and they try to charge me for another diagnostic. I refuse, and go back to the store yelling and screaming that I want my money back, and my computer, so they oblige eventually. I took my G4 to some place on Lincoln in Santa Monica like 10 minutes after that, and they fixed it by evening. Turns out it was a firmware problem. The guy who sold me the computer, yeah the techie at Mac Enthusiasts, gave me the wrong OS CD when I bought the computer from him, so the firmware I was running didn’t support the hardware on the computer. Now how hard is that to diagnose? And some bozo at Mac Enthusiasts kept my computer for two weeks, and did nothing but run Norton’s Antivirus on it.
I’ll never go back.
on Aug 4th, 2008
I also had a problem there!!! I went to the Mac store about a computer that wouldn’t turn on anymore and they told me that since I hadn’t bought the three year warranty, they would have to charge me over $1000 flat rate just to check out what the problem was. But, before I left, he checked the hard drive for free and said that it was fine so it was most likely my optical drive that needed to be replaced (a simple thing to fix if you look up instructions online, but you need a CD to put in your computer which I could not do since that part of my computer was jammed). Overall, he made it seem like it really wasn’t a big deal, and I just needed to get a specialist to remove a jammed CD from the computer. So, the guy at Mac told me I would be better off going to Mac Enthusiasts since they would only charge me for parts and labor. I assumed this was a better option and took my computer over to the one on Pico. After a week, they finally called me back and claimed that it was my hard drive that had multiple problems and it would cost me over $1000 to repair the damages but that they wouldn’t be able to retrieve any of my data (keep in mind that the Mac store did multiple tests on my computer and assured me that my hard drive was completely fine). So when I questioned Mac Enthusiasts about this, they switched me over to Mark. This is when Mark all of a sudden started to back step and tell me that maybe it wasn’t my hard drive after all and it was just my optical drive (which would cost $100 instead of the +$1000 that they had just quoted me). Of course, after another week they called back and told me that my whole computer was destroyed and that it wasn’t worth my time to fix the it at all. I found this rather odd since they kept changing their story, so I decided it wasn’t worth my time to keep working with these sneaky bastards. I knew that the people at Mac Enthusiasts were not to be trusted so I had my father go to pick up my computer when he was done with work because I did NOT want them to keep it. Unfortunately, my dad knows very little about computers and made a stupid deal with ME in which they could KEEP my computer and only give us $200 in exchange. The only perk to this deal was that they would retrieve the information off my computer (that they had previously told me was IMPOSSIBLE to get back) and give that to us. Ultimately, they claimed that task was worth the price of the computer and that this was a more than fair deal. Mac Enthusiasts basically stole my computer (with a brand new battery for $130) and in return gave me data that they had previously claimed was gone. I was stupid for not taking care of this issue myself, but overall, the people here lie and steal and are not to be trusted. DO NOT GO THERE