A tale of excellent customer service...

A tale of excellent customer service...  About a year ago, Debbie and I upgraded from our old iPhone 5 to brand-new iPhone 6s+.  We made the decision – not too bright, in hindsight – to carry them around without protective covers.  Mainly this was because our new phones are huge by comparison with our old ones.  This is great for our aging eyeballs, but makes them a tad challenging to carry around with us.  The protective cover would have added significantly to the already-bulky phones.  We did decide to buy AppleCare for our phones, eying its insurance (for loss or damage) as a safety net.

We love our new iPhones.  They're terrific machines.  But, perhaps predictably, we both managed to break our screens – and within a week of each other, too.  Debbie's phone had some cosmetic damage to the aluminum case, but the damage on mine seemed to be restricted to the glass screen.

We don't have an Apple store anywhere near us, but there is an authorized dealer in Logan, a company called Expercom.  About ten days ago I took Debbie's phone in there, on a Thursday.  The nice folks there helped me through the process of sending it for repair.  It was actually quite painless.  We had the option of getting a loaner phone, free, but they didn't have any in stock.  So I opted to send it in without the loaner, and then Apple would FedEx the repaired phone directly to our house to save time.  The Expercom folks told me to expect the repaired phone the following Tuesday or Wednesday.

Well, that's not quite what happened.

On Monday morning, around 9:30 am, FedEx showed up with a box from Apple.  Inside was a brand new phone, not the broken one we sent in.  A little note explained that the damage to her phone was such that a replacement was necessary.  Given that her phone was working fine, I think that can't possibly be true – they must be routinely replacing busted phones.  Also, given the speed with which she received the replacement, it must have been sent before Apple even received her broken phone.

So to summarize, because we had AppleCare:
1.  The total cost of fixing the phone was $29.99.
2.  The turnaround time was two business days, including shipping
3.  The phone was replaced with a new one, not repaired.

I can find absolutely nothing to criticize in that response!  I turned my phone in for repair yesterday. :)  This time they had a loaner available, so that's what I'm carrying around now.  The loaner was crazy easy to configure: I just restored a backup, entered my cloud password, and poof! – my phone was back!