Over the past month, I’ve had yet another chance to evaluate the level of quality support exhibited at Apple stores.  It all started with a rather common and obvious issue: A piece of dust got underneath the glass of my iPhone display.  I took the phone into the Woodland Apple store in Grand Rapids, MI (the nearest store to me).  The genius took the phone and with one glance said “Yep, I see the problem and we’ll go ahead and replace the display for you.”  Awesome.  Or so I thought at the time.

After leaving the Apple store, I started to notice a problem I had when I first got my iPhone back in June: One side of my screen was darker and had a more yellow tone than the other side of the screen.  I tried not to let it get to me, but I couldn’t take it any longer.  I was going to have to make another appointment and go back in.  I did this, went in 2 days later and showed the genius the issue.  It took him a little while to see it, but he did see he could see that difference from the bottom half of the screen to the top half, and said they’d do another screen replacement.  He did the replacement, and I left the store.

It wasn’t long after _that_ appointment that I noticed once again, my screen was darker on the bottom half than the top.  I made yet another appointment, and went back in.  This time, the genius I got was a lot more rude about the situation.  He essentially asked me what I wanted them to do.  I told him to do whatever was necessary to fix the problem.  He just kept asking “do you want another screen or not?”  I told him I’d like another screen.  I got the phone back that time, noticed right away it looked iffy but the genius did not look to happy and so I just decided I’d take it and make another appointment if need be.

I could still see the uneven brightness and difference in color/tone from one side of the screen to the other.  My family and friends said they could not tell, but I definitely could.  I made one more appointment at the GR Apple store.  I met with the genius, who said he could barely see a problem but he did notice it was slightly off and he took it in back to replace the screen again.  However when he came out, he took about 8 iPhones with him.  He showed them all to me and told me every iPhone has a slightly different color tone to it.  He then told me that they would not do anything more at that store for this problem as it wasn’t really a “problem” but just “the way the iPhone screens are.”  To clarify–my problem never was with the fact that all the iPhone screens look different (although I don’t believe the SHOULD), but that my screen looked uneven and was different from one side to the other!

After this experience I decided to make another appointment at a different Apple store.  I wasn’t going to live with a screen that looked problematic compared to the iPhones on display in the store, and the ones my friends own.  I made an appointment in Chicago at the North Michigan Ave. store.

The experience in Chicago was completely the opposite of that in Grand Rapids.  Instead of the genius being disgusted with me for coming in so many times, he apologized to me that the issue hadn’t been resolved after coming in so much.  He looked at my iPhone and did a complete diagnostic on it right away.  Since my problem had become intermittent (of course every problem I have goes away the minute I try to show someone at the store), he didn’t personally SEE the problem.  However, he did notice my iPhone was hotter on one side than the other which he thought was suspect.  He offered me two options–to have another screen replacement, or to replace the entire iPhone.  This second option was never offered in Grand Rapids.  I took the option of replacing the iPhone.  Once it was all set up, I looked at it and found it to look just as I expected.  No weird uneven brightness issue.  Problem solved, finally!

There are a couple of things I took away from this.  First of all, whether or not the screens were the cause of my problem, Apple really needs to put a better screen in the next version of the iPhone.  It’s pretty obvious now that these screens are painfully low res compared to new competition out there.  They also shouldn’t differ from one phone to the next.  There should be some better standards in how they’re calibrated so there’s not such variation.  The argument of “well your screen is ok because all of our screens are tinted different” is just not acceptable.  Secondly, none of Apple’s stores should just give up on a customer.  Even though my problem wasn’t obvious, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something bothering me about that phone!  They also had only tried ONE thing–replacing screens!  They simply would not consider that maybe, just maybe, there was something else other than the screen itself that was causing the issue.  That led me to believe they had stopped taking me seriously and just did whatever was easiest to get me out of the store.  The Chicago store actually worked with me, and fixed it once and for all.

So here’s to hoping for better iPhone displays (OLED?) and a more consistent experience across Apple’s retail stores in 2010.  C’mon Apple, it’s time to step up your game and compete because honestly if Apple is willing to give up on me, I could just as easily give up on them for a Google phone that is in many ways just as good.

***UPDATE***
I went into the Apple Store at Woodland just last night, and had a much better experience than what I wrote above.  I think it comes down to specifically who you are dealing with that makes such a big difference.   I had some dust under the glass of my iPhone display, and the Grand Rapids store was more than willing to replace that display for me.  The display I got as a replacement was not affected by the issue I wrote about earlier either.   I’m thankful that it worked out this way, and I hope you can still take something away from this big long rant.  My advice is don’t settle for a flaw no matter how small.  Persistence, patience, and civility are all very important qualities when dealing with something like this!  But I hope you never run into a situation like this, or if you do have a problem with something, I hope it’s much more obvious.