Altair Electronics — Local services in Ontario

My wife's iPhone needed its battery replaced (surprise, surprise!), and we didn't want to wait a few weeks for Apple's mail-in solution, so I found Altair Electronics (an Authorized Service Provider for Apple products) on Google. I highly recommend them!

Most importantly for a service provider like this, the people at Altair Electronics are highly knowledgeable.

On Monday this week, I originally spoke over the phone with Len, who clearly explained what would need to happen in order to resurrect the phone. He gave me a straight-forward quote and suggested that I drop off the phone this morning (Wednesday).

For the kind of surgery that the phone required in this case, it was necessary for us to disable the FindMyiPhone feature. However, I had been unable to do that, because we couldn't even turn it on. Nevertheless, when I walked in this morning Len was able to help me make it happen, with no problem at all.

When I described in further detail the problems we were having with the phone (that it wouldn't even charge anymore), he mentioned a couple of possible reasons for those problems, beyond just the battery. Our initial intention when we spoke over the phone was simply to replace the battery, and so Len assured me that if the problem was something further than that, he would certainly call me first. Sure enough, a simple battery-swap fixed everything.

Less than 3 hours later, the phone was ready to go, and as good as new! Their prices were more than fair (and exactly as originally quoted), and their service was second-to-none.

And in case it isn't clear yet, I also found Len to be very friendly and professional. Altair Electronics is now my go-to place when my electronics...

Neutral rating given my wife's experience.

It took a bit of back and forth for my wife to get her phone taken care of. She had a warranty repair covered under Apple Care, the initial difficulty was around the process of getting things fixed, since she needed to do a full backup due to the phone getting swapped out rather than fixed - this was not well communicated, so she just handed her phone over.

After she got the new phone, she brought it home to restore it. After the restore, she didn't have any cell service - I found out it was because there was no SIM card installed in the device. Clearly the SIM card was not swapped over before giving her the new device. However, after going back to the store, she was told there was no SIM card in the device.

I checked my cell service provider's website to disable the SIM card 24 hours after the device had been out of our hands and found out that 23 phone calls had been made from the device in the last 2 hours.

This is extremely suspicious behavior and indicates either poor chain of custody or poor communication (that a SIM card should have been removed prior to providing the device). Improvements somewhere on one of these categories is necessary for a better outcome.

Unfortunately, this removes any confidence I have in bringing future work to...

So…I called ahead about a problem I was having with my browser…a problem where pages would sometimes show up or not. Larry said he’d take on the repair and I was to drop off my computer.

That I did but what was weird was he never came out from behind his enclosure speaking to me from behind frosted glass and I never saw his face. Follow up calls to him after that were not answered and messages not returned. After a week I finally got him on the phone and he said to come on down.

When I got there I finally connected with a face and he told me he had just touched the computer for the first time (and I mean this was my computer being away for week…absolutely distressing!). But what he said turned out to be right on the mark: my computer was dying fast. He heard noises on the computer and things just didn’t add up. “Back up immediately”. He wasn’t about to attempt any repairs.

I wasn’t sure to believe him because of the poor customer service but I did the backup anyways. Well low and behold he was right…the whole thing completely gave up for good within 2 weeks. Lucky I did that full backup.

Bottom line: poor customer service but very...