More than once, when I had a Lenovo ThinkPad that needed depot service for a hardware fault, Lenovo has told me to remove the HD and keep it; at the depot they insert a temporary freshly-imaged HD, complete the repair and battery of tests, and send the ThinkPad back to me empty, for me to replace my own HD. (If I were still to have a problem, then I could complete the repair myself by replacing the HD.) This has always worked flawlessly.
They might not replace your computer if you mess it up while taking it apart, but you're not going to have a problem getting support with a new hard drive.
My coworker replaced the keyboard in a MacBook Pro and when he called to ask AppleCare if they would still honor the warranty they said yes.
My gf had to take her laptop into the Genius Bar a little while ago for an airport issue. Apparently, a routine part of the intake process is to ask for the user's account password. This pissed me off so much I almost caused a scene in the store.
Obviously, if they have the hardware, they can do pretty much whatever they'd like, so it wasn't that they would be able to use it to look at her personal files or whatever (we had already removed anything personal before bringing it in).
It was that they, acting as a trusted authority, were telling people that it's okay to give away your password. It also means that anyone who uses the same password for their machine as they do for their email or their other accounts is handing their life over. Of course people shouldn't be doing this, but of course very many do, and it's just completely irresponsible of Apple to explicitly put people in a position where this could easily be exploited by some faceless tech behind the counter.
As much as I love their products, I really hate how Apple operates sometimes.
I just create a new account called "applestore" with admin rights. This allows me to give them access to the OS without access to my files (I use FileVault). However, this is something they should be doing on their own instead of asking users to trust them with their password.
Whenever I've had to bring my computer in, they've always told me to create a new account called something like "Apple" or "Apple Store", and they probably should have asked for the same thing from her.
I suppose there are times where the computer won't boot and they really don't have any other choice besides asking you for your password--the employee might have just mixed up their protocol, though that's not to say that it excuses that mistake.
From the anecdotes here, it sounds like that's just smart employees or a manager at your store making that decision. It really should be company policy.
They've never asked me to create a separate account, only turn over the main account. I still don't trust anyone with my user account, and so made one name AppleSupport, and enabled FileVault on my user.
One would think that for a company so concerned with internal privacy they would care a little more for their users...
How is it that they need to know the password in that instance? If the problem is that the computer doesn't boot, they just have to get it to boot, not log in to your profile and start monkeying around.
Everytime I've been in, I've been asked to either disable my password or create an account for the Genius Bar and provide them with that password (or leave it blank).
Apple doesn't want to be in the business of fielding customer complaints about missing or unreadable files. Which, in the context of a hard drive replacement or repair, is not exactly an uncommon outcome.
Apple also doesn't want to be in the business of helping people recover files from dead drives.
Apple really, really doesn't want to be in the business of ensuring that the drive it removed from a computer goes back to the same owner as the original machine. Try to imagine what the Apple repair depo looks like: Drives everywhere. Try to remember that a drive inside a computer is protected by a user password, but a drive sitting outside the computer is not protected at all. Except perhaps by Filevault, which many users do not enable. If you think getting no drive back is bad, imagine the scandal if you got someone else's drive, and someone else got your drive.
Apple's simple policy solves all of these problems. They don't send drives back. Instead they promise to erase them. Either you find this credible or you don't. If you don't, you'd better be using Filevault, because once you put an unencrypted drive in the hands of a tech its content is as good as disclosed. And if you are using Filevault, what is the problem with refurbing your drive? It's filled with unreadable encrypted data!
Finally, dare I suggest that nobody except the typical HN reader is better at disposing of old hard drives without a security incident than Apple is? I bet if you hand a broken hard drive back to the average buyer, outside of a computer, 90% of those drives will eventually get thrown away intact. Exactly how is throwing a readable hard drive in your local dumpster more secure than Apple's dedicated drive-erasure-or-disposal facility?
> Exactly how is throwing a readable hard drive in your local dumpster more secure than Apple's dedicated drive-erasure-or-disposal facility?
I agree with many of your points, but would argue throwing a hard drive in a dumpster is more secure. Bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. Where would tech savvy people looking for unerased hard drives find a supply--where the hard drives are! Those folks are more likely to work at Apple than dumpster dive for a living.
Well, it depends on the threat model. If someone has the plan to search through a thousand hard drives belonging to a cross-section of random people, one byte at a time, looking for something of value, then sure - it might be worth the effort to corrupt someone at Apple.
But if you are an industrial spy looking for a particular secret, or a personal enemy looking for data about one person, or an aspiring burglar casing a particular building - you look in the trash can belonging to your target.
I think the latter threat is as plausible as the former.
I don't understand why companies can't leave hard drives alone. My little brother recently sent in a Dell Studio for a keyboard repair. He went against my advice and went through Best Buy for the RMA instead of doing it himself. He signed a bunch of documents denying liability and giving Dell/BB the right to do whatever they wanted with the machine, pretty much.
When he got the laptop back, he was told that the "hard drive was going bad", so they proactively replaced it with a new one with a default image. This made me really mad, but they don't care or understand. Even if it was going bad, that was still HIS hard drive. The computer was still under warranty so they should have shipped the old disk back with the new.
I don't trust anyone else to clean out disks on my behalf. There are far too many instances of negligence on the matter. If the drive really was going bad, they should have sent it back and let me destroy and dispose of it personally.
How do I know that they don't have a FBI hookup that scans all of the "bad" drives before refurbishing or disposing, or how do I know that they don't have a contract with the MPAA/RIAA to allow their anti-piracy goons to do that? How do I know it doesn't pass through a group of teenagers who parse it for nudes, as happens at most computer repair shops?
Yeah, it sucks pretty bad. My family is completely indifferent to it and it's probably too late to call and try to get something done about it. : (
This will continue to happen as long as consumers believe that computers are "appliances," without realizing that those "appliances" have almost every facet of someone's life on it, and giving it to someone else is doing the same with everything you've ever done on that computer - even if you've "cleared the cookies."
As you can see below, this post was timed perfectly for me. I was at the Apple store to get a harddrive replaced 10 minutes after this was posted. I did a little digging and wrote a blog post on the same issue, which I'll post here to prevent 100 apple stories from taking up the front page.
I'm angry because I think apple is earning money from product failure!
Aren’t there other shops in the US that will repair your MacBook for you? It’s not as if you have to go there, at least not if you are out of warranty.
I wanted the OEM harddrive. From what I understand, they are difficult to source for unauthorized service providers. (The link I responded was an Authorized Service Provider.)
When I've sent a laptop to AppleCare, they're very explicit about the possibility that they won't return the same drive, and that you should backup your data. That said, they've never actually taken a drive from me. So Winer's claim that "they take the old drive" isn't well researched.
Beyond that, Winer straight up doesn't know what they do with the drives; it's pure speculation. What he's really saying is that he doesn't trust Apple. If that's the case, he should take it to an independent Authorized Apple Service Provider that he does — it's just that simple. [Edit: not only can you still get AppleCare coverage at independent providers, but you can easily negotiate with a technician to keep your drive. At the place I worked, the drives that customers abandoned we took great pleasure in destroying!]
Further, when Winer says, "If Steve thinks it's confidential, maybe he should take some steps to protect the info?" — is that not exactly what he's doing?
I believe that Winer is talking about cases in which the hard drive will be replaced. If you know your disk has issues, but it still operates, shouldn't you be able to keep your old drive?
It seems shady to me to give over an old drive full of personal information without giving the user the option to keep it.
"I mean seriously, most of us don't have the kind of money Steve has. If our bank accounts were cleared out by an identity thief we'd be fairly screwed."
But if Steve's bank account was cleared out, he'd be OK somehow? $0 is $0 regardless of how much money you had before you lost everything.
People with Steve's wealth don't keep their life savings in a checking account. Any single checking or savings account is on the order of 100,000th of his total net worth.
I think that says more about how one should manage or protect their money than about Apple's repair policy. If losing your computer would bankrupt you, you're doing it wrong....
I just came from the Apple store. There was a problem with my brand new machine, so they replaced the whole machine and did a data transfer for me. Without me even asking, the tech assured me that a secure disk erase is part of the data migration procedure.
HackerNews is almost omniscient. I am in the Apple Store right now, waiting for a genius to talk to me to replace my first gen Air drive. I did not know I couldn't get my drive. Now I can at least prepare for the argument and try to stay civil.
And get this -- when Apple sells you a "new" drive to replace the broken one, at 1.5 times what it would cost mail order, how much you want to bet it's someone else's broken hard drive that they got for free.
I've personally run some recovery programs on a Samsung replacement drive I received (from Samsung, not Apple) and I was able to recover files that presumably belonged to a previous owner. I didn't bother checking if it contained any personal information (I was only interested in recovering a corrupted dotfile), but it seems possible that sensitive information could have been contained on said drive.
