Apple don’t care anymore

I don’t know whether it is the fact that Tim Cook stood alongside Donald Trump at the 2025 Presidential Inauguration Ceremony, or if that’s pure coincidence, but a few days after that I had cause to contact Apple Support about what I considered to be a fairly routine, fixable problem and 6 weeks, multiple phone calls, multiple emails and two Genius Bar visits later, I still have the problem and Apple have gone quiet on me.

I use a wired ethernet connection on my Mac Studio in my home office. We had a thunderstorm on January 28th 2025, a few hours after this I did some work on my Mac Studio and the internet connection was painfully slow. I contacted Virgin Media Business, my ISP, as I assumed the electrical storm may have caused a problem on their side. They sent an engineer out who found no problem found and testing the internet on my Mac using a USB-C to ethernet adapter, showed that the speed was fine, but the ethernet connection had a fault.

I contacted Apple, I bought a brand new CAT6 ethernet cable at their request, went through various checks they then suggested I take it to the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store. I did this, plugged it in and no fault was found. They cleaned it, restarted it, plugged it in again and no fault. I came home, plugged it in, I still had the fault.

Then came a series of follow-up calls and one further Genius Bar visit but the same thing happened again, no fault at Apple, just at my house.

The fault is basically a painfully slow speed for upload and download. My usual ISP speed is 850 Mbps download and 80 Mbps upload. With this fault it is around 0.2 Mbps download and upload - this is worse than the worst rural ADSL broadband speed. I also checked it on our second broadband service we have here (Sky). Same behaviour, usualy speed on wifi or dongle, 0.2 or so with ethernet connected.

I asked Apple to swap out the ethernet port. They refused on thr basis that in the store there is no fault seen. Here are some of the things tried so far:

1) Set up a new ethernet connection

2) Set up a new user

3) Reinstalled the OS

4) Wiped the hard drive and set up my Mac as brand new

5) Brough my neighbour’s iMac over, plugged it in to my ethernet cable, full speed seen

Despite doing all of this, I still have the problem some 6 weeks later.

Apple say the ethernet port is fine, but have never suggested what they think it could be nor asked me to try anything else. The logical person in me suggests replacing the ethernet port is worth trying as they have no perceivable idea what else the fault could be.

I’ve had Apple products for 15 years, I use them every day. But I now have zero confidence that they provide even half-decent customer support any more. They go quiet and I have to prompt them to do anything. I have told them to give me a regular email update even if they don’t have any real news. I want to be kep informed. But they have switched off, perhaps running the calendar out until my AppleCare runs out in a few weeks’ time - I wouldn’t put it past them.

Sometimes in a complaint situation the complainant is asked “what would it take to resolve the matter?”.

Let me see, HOW ABOUT SWAPPING OUT THE THE ETHERNET PORT!

#apple #applesupport #applefailure