As anyone who knows me can attest, I have for more than 12 years been a very Large Apple fan. Going to work for AppleCare in 2007 was a dream come true, and leaving to launch this site and Fatboyheaven.com was a very hard decision.
I set the stage thus to let you know that in this light the fact that my experience with Apple today has me re-thinking my love of this company. I placed an order for in-store pickup of the new iPad Air last night, and was given a guaranteed pickup of today. I have been in the Apple Store since receiving an alert almost 2 hours ago informing me that my order was ready for pickup. The iPad with a crisp white label and my name is here in the store managers hands, but I am leaving without an iPad today. Something has gone wrong in the system that transmits online orders to the store, and my order is stuck in a limbo state to the point that no one in the company can even cancel it.
For a company that is renowned (and often heralded by myself and this website) to have a failure of this magnitude is ludicrous.
I was hoping to have a hands on review up for you all to read today, but I am not likely to have an iPad in my hands before the store closes tonight.
For this I apologize deeply, and hope that I have something to review at some later time.
It has now been 36 hours since I placed my order, and I have still not been able to get my iPad or even cancel the order. I once again called and spoke with Apple Online Sales Support, and was told that my only option was to wait, or to pay for ANOTHER ipad (and get one other than what I ordered as the one I ordered is not in stock at any Apple Retail store in the state).
I asked for a supervisor at this point, and was escalated to Tier 2. There I was informed that there were a "limited number" of orders that had gotten stuck in the interchange between the Web Sales system and the retail system, causing this indefinite hold on orders. I was very clear with her that I run this site and needed the unit to write a review, to which I was told it was now being referred to an "Order Maintenance Team" that was trying to manually process these stuck orderes, but she was unsure how long it would take.
It is now five days since this process started, and Apple has informed me that they still have no ETA on resolution. Apparently a glitch between the systems of Apple Online Sales and Apple Retail affected several thousand orders, and mine is one of several hundred still unresolved. The Sales Support Supervisor I spoke with said that she was "sorry and embarassed" that she was having to give me that news, and that everyone in her group was appaled that the issue was as of yet unresolved.
I'll continue to post updates as available.