An Apple-FedEx debacle had a local man caught in the middle

Apple has a massive customer experience program, that pervades the company. The trick is to get them to ask you "how likely would you recommend apple" in some form of survey.

A low score, will trigger an alert in their system, and somebody is likely to contact you to try to resolve the issue.

Go to a genius bar if you have to, just to get the follow-up survey.

Getting stuck in between corporate finger pointing is always a pain.

The example I remember was attempting to play Red Alert 3 online after a few years gap. The multiplayer server indicated my key was blocked for a message along the lines of too many registrations - I'd only used it on a single PC over a span of a month some years earlier.

So I contacted EA support, and they told me basically "your retailer [steam] must have given out the same key to multiple users, contact them for a new one". They wanted Steam to issue me a new key, and thereby eat the cost.

Of course, Steam was having none of that, this was a problem with the developer's service and so they wiped their hands of it saying it was up to EA to fix their shit.

After a while I decided there's only so many lengths I was willing to go to for what was then a €30 video game so I went to play starcraft 2 instead.

While it’s frustrating to deal with situations like this, in my experience Apple doesn’t have a problem compensating customers for the trouble. I’ve gotten free iPhones, an upgrade from a 15” to a 17” laptop, and free headphones among other things. You just need to ask, as it’s rare for Apple to offer.