I finally made the permanent switch from a PC to a Mac — specifically, a sleek and juiced up MacBook Pro — after years of waffling over the convenience of compatibility (my previous 9-to-5 didn’t supply a laptop and required usage of Windows-only software) and the coolness of Apple’s experience.

Having drinks with a Mac-compatible friend one evening, I informed him of my imminent switch, and he warned me that Apple’s user experience doesn’t carry over to customer support. Perhaps suffering from the “That can’t happen to me!” syndrome, I wasn’t deterred and ordered up a shiny new laptop. What followed was a series of communication breakdowns, buck-passing, and ineptitude of a magnitude far greater than any I’ve ever witnessed with any product company.

The problem with the MacBook Pro was simple, minor, and easy to reproduce (the details can be found elsewhere.)  The Mac Geniuses(tm) at the new Apple Store in Boston took it away from me for a week, and then proceeded to give me different hourly diognoses: Need to replace the logic board (the common solution to a host of Mac-related issues),  Need to replace my iPod Shuffle, they don’t need to replace anything, etc. When nothing worked they told me to send it back and they (Apple) would send me a new one. So there I was, in an Apple Store, surrounded by MacBook Pros, and instead of simply trading one for the another, I had to send mine back, and then I would be sent a new machine from Shanghai.

Shanghai is in China, by the way, which is very far from Boston.

When I order a shirt from J.Crew and the shirt is missing a button, the kids working in the Chinese factory don’t churn out another shirt — they just pull one with a button off the rack and call it a day. Apple’s online store cannot mix inventory with the retail store. The reason, it turns out is software-based: The inventories are tracked in different (incompatible) systems.

After poking and prodding the Apple Online Store to issue me FedEx tags, I shipped my busted MBP back to Apple. A week later, the new one arrived, and when it did I discovered that the new machine had the same issue as the old. Lo and behold, an hour of searching on Apple’s Knowledge Base (buried within their Support site) resulted in this article, which basically says “Yes, we know there is an issue. Deal with it.” Bear in mind, the Mac Geniuses, who supposedly have access to a vast wealth of knowledge and resources that we mere consumers do not, never found this article.

Fantastically amusing epilogue: Today I received an “We’ve Recently Shipped Your Order” email from Apple Support. Because I haven’t ordered anything else from Apple, I called Apple Support asking just what in hell they were sending me now. It turns out that because I bought the computer using an Apple Gift Card through their employee purchase program (disclosure: my brother is a Mac Specialist), Apple couldn’t process my return directly. Since they had to charge something for the return, they charged my current gift card for a new one — worth exactly $0.01.

So, even the company that made user experience a mainstream conversation suffers from total experience failure.

But man, this machine sings! I can blog again!