From my experience (in UK) Apple customer service has been always great. There is always to wait and you have almost no chances to talk with the same person, but they try to help. The problem is on the infrastructure behind it: their technical service replaced the screen of my TiBook500 and, while at there, they decided to replace also the logic board (for no obvious reason) with one at 400MHz. Then, after 1 year, I sent my Albook (graciously provided by Apple to replace my TiBook500-400) for a stuck key on the keyboard and a failing hard drive, and they forgot to replace the HD. They replaced it the second time, but they forgot to connect to the rest of the machine. And when I wanted to send it the third time, there was an outage of shipping boxes (more than 2 week to wait). In all these occasions Apple Customer Service tried to help and to solve the problems arisen from their technical workshops. BTW after waiting some time for the shortage of boxes, the Apple Customer Service just sent me a new computer.... Silvo Silvo Conticello Albook 17" 1.67GHz/1.5Gb RAM/120Gb HD/OS10.4.4 iMac 1GHz/500Mb Ram/80Gb HD/OS10.4.3/17" display Cambridge UK