Apple third-party repair shops in the Bay Area?
August 23, 2009 9:17 AM   Subscribe

What's the Bay Area equivalent of TekServe?

More specifically, looking for competent and honest Apple upgrade and repair shops that will work on machines that are out of Applecare, and which will do aftermarket upgrades (e.g. new hard drives, etc.)

Bonus: close to Palo Alto.
posted by NucleophilicAttack to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: We Fix Macs has locations in Palo Alto and Santa Clara. They get positive reviews on yelp. I know about a dozen people that have used them for repair of ipods and iphones, and all were happy with the experience.
posted by fief at 11:15 AM on August 23, 2009


MacMedic, formerly Rosai Group in San Francisco is often cited as such a service provider. Personally, I've had a good deal of trouble with them in the past, with a number of repairs taking longer than promised or work being done incorrectly (components replaced when it turned out the HD cable was just loose to name one example). In my experience, they will not call you to update you on repair status, and will be annoyed when you call to ask why your computer isn't ready days after they said it would be.

Depending on the machine and the upgrade, some aftermarket upgrades are totally possible for you to do yourself. Some are designed to be done yourself (RAM in a MacBook or MBP for example) and some are just fairly simple to do anyway. iFixIt.com is a good resource if you think you know what's wrong and want to know what is involved in, well, fixing it. Will help you have an idea of what the tech needs to do so you can manage expectations in terms of time and parts.

Also, I sent Cory Doctorow there maybe 5 years back when he needed an emergency repair on a PowerBook where the screen wouldn't latch closed. They ended up making the problem significantly worse by breaking a piece off the latching mechanism before giving up. Cory was less than pleased with my recommendation. *blushes*
posted by zachlipton at 12:29 PM on August 23, 2009


Best answer: I used these guys in San Jose a couple of years ago when the drive in my powerbook G4 died. I work in Menlo Park; they will send you a shipping box for your computer, but I dropped mine off and picked it up, since they were only a half-hour or so from my office.

I had it back within a week and they were able to get everything off my old drive without trouble and install it on the new drive. Cost about...$350? I think? Including the new drive, reinstalling everything, etc. Incredible reasonable to me at the time, of course. At the time, my powerbook was long, long out of warranty.

So, yeah, I recommend them.
posted by rtha at 2:18 PM on August 23, 2009


Not to open up a can of worms, but have you tried asking the guys at the infamous Fry's (main store in Mountain View, as I recall) for a recommendation? I know they don't sell Macs, but I bet they'd know the terrain of local repair services.
posted by foxy_hedgehog at 3:31 PM on August 23, 2009


Fry's sells Macs. I don't think they fix them, though.
posted by contraption at 8:39 PM on August 23, 2009


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