Following up with parts 3, 2, and 1 - I finally received my replacement TruePower battery from FastMac. I can honestly say I probably wouldn’t have this battery by now if it hadn’t been for me E-mailing the utter crap out FastMac. Let me recap just in case you missed something, or if you’d rather not read all 3 parts. Back in June of 2009 I had an issue with a MacBook Pro battery from FastMac. The battery lost all of it’s cycles, dropped it’s charge, and then came back to life. When the battery came back to life, several cells died, they became swollen and dead. This resulted in an unbelievable amount of power loss. I contacted FastMac to get a replacement since I was under warranty. This was in the last two weeks of June. They told me there would be a back-order until the beginning of July 2009, roughly three weeks, FastMac informed me. This was fine with me. I was out of town, so two weeks went by. I shipped the package out, they received the package one week after I had shipped it. This was the cap of the three week waiting period. So I expected a quick turn around and to have my battery replaced shortly.
Read the rest of this entry »
- ^ here’s an ugly image for a ugly situation.
Following up with part 2 of the battery fiasco. I have not had any luck contacting FastMac by e-mail. There have not been any updates about the whereabouts of the replacement battery since my last post. FastMac hasn’t contacted me since writing part 2. I called FastMac today to see what’s going on. They actually answered! FastMac told me they are expecting a shipment in the first week(s) of September. The fellow that I spoke with said it could be as early as this week. I, for one, highly doubt it. We’ll give them the benifit of the doubt though. I know this post really is not anything more than a status update. I thought I would let you all know the status of the battery as of today.
Technically there’s not really a pt.1 to this post. For the sake of discussion we’ll refer to the review I posted on December 20th 2008 as part 1. I am having yet another issue with the FastMac batteries. In my review I praised FastMac for being very punctual and generally on the ball with everything.
After writing the review, some folks left comments expressing some concern about FastMac’s service. I defended FastMac at first. Sometimes one or two bad transactions happen. Now that I have done more research, my views have changed. The stories from the comments are starting to hit pretty close to home.
If you recall back in December 2008 when I wrote the review I just had a MacBook Pro battery replaced by FastMac because the one I had purchased in October of 2008 mysteriously died after only having it for two weeks. I thought at first the issue was due to me neglecting the battery while it sat on my desk with a 36% charge. Now I think that was not the case at all. I firmly believe it is due to the batteries being cheaply made. The reason I have changed my views are because I am currently in the process of replacing yet another FastMac Truepower battery. Read the rest of this entry »
“Green is good! Dead batteries are no good!”
I recently had a faulty MacBook Pro battery replaced by FastMac and thought I would share my experience with you all. Was it good or was it bad? First let me explain the situation. On October 1st, 2008 I ordered a brand new replacement battery for my 15” MacBook Pro, one of the FastMac TruePower batteries. The batteries claim to have 68% more capacity than the “other” brand of Apple batteries. You can find out if it’s true by looking at a couple reviews here and here. For the short time that I used the battery it seemed to perform well. I cannot comment on the longevity of the battery though, as mine became inoperable after a few weeks of use. Why did my battery suddenly die? I made the mistake of taking the battery out of my MacBook Pro when the charge on the battery was at 36%. I left the battery sitting on my desk for about 2 weeks without charging it, causing the charge to slowly deplete. After that, the battery would no longer charge. Whoops.
On October 14th I contacted FastMac about my situation, explaining what had happened and that the battery was completely dead. I received a reply within the hour! They asked for the serial number, cycle count, charge capacity, some other general information from the System Profiler, and my order number. I received a follow up email within 20 minutes (or less) of sending my reply. The customer service rep told me that I had a couple options as they were out of stock of this particular model of battery. He told me I could either send the battery in and they would exchange it free of charge when the new shipment arrived, or if I was in a hurry they could ship me an Apple branded battery if I put down a $100 deposit that would be refunded when they received the old battery. I opted to send the old battery in and wait. Luckily the new shipment arrived before my package reached FastMac! It was immediate turnaround, I got my new battery in 3 days after sending my dead one in.
FastMac’s customer service is great: they are very fast, super nice, and easy to talk to. They listen to your problems and try to help you resolve them to the best of their abilities. I was really happy with the exchange and would recommend FastMac to anyone thinking about purchasing from them. Their products are great, I get 4 and a half – 5 hours of battery life on this new battery. On top of all that, they are also very reasonably priced.
Edit – 08/06/2009 – Rating changed from 4.5 stars to 3.5. Read here to find out why. http://www.knoxware.org/fastmac-battery-saga-pt-2/
FastMac Service gets a rating of 4.5 stars.
Rating: 
