I shipped my old MacBook Pro as a trade-in to Apple (actually, an Apple partner) on Day Thirty; they received it on Day Thirty-Six. I expected to hear from them within a few days, but nothing happened, so I got in touch with Apple who told me to hang on a few more days. Nothing happened, so I tried again on Day Fifty-One (Wednesday). The agent tried to figure out what was going on and finally said he’d have to escalate to the trade-in team.
The next evening (Day Fifty-Two), I got an email from the trade-in team telling me to call the actual processor, Phobio. So I did; the recording that answered asked me to press “1” if I was calling about a trade-in initiated during the purchase of a new machine – I pressed “1” and was immediately greeted by “Welcome to Apple Support”. I thought the problem might be that I was calling too late, so I decided to try this morning – same result. My Apple agent this time was even MORE helpful – she tried to call Phobio using some secret method, but, after 45 minutes listening to a dead line, she gave up and escalated me to the trade-in team, having annotated my record even more.
An hour later, I got THE EXACT SAME EMAIL from the trade-in team telling me to contact Phobio. I was not happy. I thought about writing an email to Tim Cook and seeing if that would work, but then I thought about going public and using Twitter. I wrote a polite tweet to @AppleSupport and @PhobioSupport and got a reply from Phobio a few minutes later, asking me to DM them my order number.
Minutes later, I got a DM telling me that they’d submitted the full estimated amount of the trade-in to be posted to my credit card within two weeks. We’ll see.