A tale of two customer support experiences

I’ve been putting together a mac mini-based home theater PC. I was going to post on it when I got it finished, but instead I have a different story.

Putting it together, I bought a few components and two different ones failed within two weeks (two weeks of each other and two weeks of opening their boxes). One was the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid. A USB-based TV tuner to record over-the-air digital TV. The other failed component was a Logitech DiNovo Edge (Mac Edition) bluetooth keyboard. Both of these are fairly pricey components, and are each somewhat critical for an HTPC.

The EyeTV just stopped being recognized by the computer. It worked fine for a few days and then poof. Dead. It happened right around the same time I did my first over-the-wire software update from them. I can’t say that it definitely was the software update, but very little else changed between when it was working and when it wasn’t. Rolling back to the previous software helped not-at-all. The computer doesn’t even see the EyeTv when it is plugged into the computer. For a device that is basically a few days old, this is a pretty crappy user experience. I contacted Elgato and they responded pretty quickly. After asking me the “dumb user” questions, they promised to send me a replacement quickly with a return label for me to return the dead unit. That was almost a week ago and I still haven’t received the new unit. Tomorrow it will be a week. That is unacceptable, I think, but I do like that they basically send you the replacement first and ask that you return the dead one.

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