Apple I'm pissed.....

This past Saturday the 13th my MacBook Pro bit the dust. It had been acting slow and randomly closing down apps. So I decided to reboot it and hope the problem would go away it didn't instead when I tried to turn it back on it came up to the gray screen that mac users are so familiar with and beeped three times. I tried to restart it again hoping that it would do something different but again it booted up and beeped three times. So I did the first thing anyone would do I went to apple.com to see if it was a battery problem or something. I looked around for half and hour and found nothing about a mac beeping three times on startup. I decided it was time to call the dreaded tech support line. I call and got the usual Indian voice 'thank you for calling apple tech support how may I help you' I told the rep my serial number and what was going on and he said 'I see you 90 days of free phone tech support has run out but before I charge you or try to sell you the applecare plan lets try some simple diagnostics so I can get a general idea if it's a software or hardware problem' I thought well that's nice. So he asks me if I have my OSX DVD with me. I tell him that I don't and he says I need to call back as soon as I get the disc. I was ok with that so as soon as I got off of work I went home got my disc and called back. This time I talked to a different rep and he was not nice to say the least. As soon as I told him my serial number and what it was doing he said I'll have to charge you 49.99 for this phone call. I was stunned being a college student I just don't have 50 bucks to blow off (that's 2 1/2 weeks of eatin). I told him what the other rep had told me and he put me on hold. 32 minutes later (yes I counted I was pissed already) he comes back and says 'What is the computer doing?' I told him the same thing I told him 30 minutes ago. He told me some instructions to run those simple diagnostics... turns out it wouldn't even load the cd and the rep thinks I'm some kind of idiot and he's like sir you need to follow these instructions specifically I told him I was but he didn't believe me. So ended up he thought there was something wrong with the optical drive; I found that kinda hard to believe since that doesn't have anything to do with my computer running slow or not starting up. So he sent me out a box and told me my computer's hard drive would have to be formatted; which again I had a hard time believing that the hard drive would need to be formatted if the optical drive was screwing up. I asked the rep if there was any way I could save my data and he said no. So I finished up the conversation and he didn't charge me (total hold time for this whole conversation was 50+ minutes) he sent me out a box and and shipping instructions. Then after hanging up the phone I decided to google the 3 beep error and found out that I could recover most of my data on the hard drive. It turns out that I had a bad ram module so I took the ram module out and it booted up just fine and I was able to recover the data that otherwise would have been lost. Needless to say I was surprised at how dumb Apple tech support could be. I thought Apples were for elites so I figured they would have a tech support service that could help me but I was sorely mistaken. So now I'm waiting for my box to get here (I'm still going to send it in to get my screen fixed it has about 50 dead pixels). So Steve if your out there reading this I just want you to know I'm having serious doubts about my next computer being a Mac.

Users of Digg please help me raise awareness about this issue; Digg this article