Failure of Apple iTunes Support
Apple’s iTunes Support is the ultimate joke, I originally submitted a ticket to them on December 4, 2009 on the issue of not able to download pre-purchased content such as TV shows from season passes, pre-ordered albums, and movies. When I go to Store -> Check for available downloads it gives me the Error “Unable to Check for available downloads the iTunes Store is temporally unavailable.”
The first support technician replied 48 hours after submission on December 6, 2009, which is a far cry off from what is listed on the Apple Support site of 24 hour or less response time. Though that was the first contact from Apple iTunes Support Team I wouldn’t hear back from them for another 6 days. I ended up calling Apple Support, and even though the Technical Support Representative really wanted to help me when she asked her Supervisor how she was to get in touch with the iTunes Support team she was told that I would have to wait for iTunes Support by email only support. So I waited.
I submitted another ticket on December 12, 2009 in addition to replying for the second time to the iTunes Support Follow up # 89658370. I received a reply back from a Senior Support Advisor that said the error was code 8003 and that the knowledge base article for error code 8008 would solve the problem.
No where in the error received from the iTunes Store was there anything resembling 8003 in the Error dialog. Also when I did a search on the Apple Support site for error code 8003 I couldn’t find anything with the same problem that I have. Also the 8008 article said to delete the temp files from the ‘/users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes_Music/Downloads‘ folder. This would probably work if there were actual ‘.tmp‘ files in the directory, but since the error message that I receive stops any downloads from beginning then there would not be any temp files downloading.
The support tech also said to turn off any virus scanners, web-accelerators and other security software. I’m not running anything such as that, guess they missed the part where I said I was running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 in the beginning of the ticket and that I had the Apple Firewall turned off.
The Senior Support Advisor said to also make a new user and try to download the content. This would show that there is a corruption on the user account and then they said if it works to transfer everything from the corrupted user to the new. That seems like a lot of work-around for an iTunes problem and could be a major overhaul, might as well backup important data and then do a clean install, which is out of the question. The new user account didn’t work either, which kind of shows that it isn’t a corruption of the user or of the iTunes install but something is messed up over on that pre-purchased download queue. If only the iTunes Support people could understand.
They said that the error signifies that there is a Internet connection problem, but if that was the case I wouldn’t be able to connect to the iTunes Store to download single apps, movies, TV shows, and music files. In fact to prove the fact that it wasn’t a actual connection problem to the iTunes Store I purchased one of the 99 Cent episodes that they have running this week to show that “Yes I can in fact connect and download individual purchases.”
The iTunes Support Team appear to be having a hard time understanding that it only happens on pre-purchased content that is put in the iTunes Store download Queue for pre-purchased items. I’ve even given them a suggestion on why don’t they delete the queue and then reissue the season pass items to be downloaded. Maybe there is something stuck in the queue that is preventing the download that is causing the error.
The Support Rep said to use another computer to download the content and then transfer them over. What if I don’t have another computer to use? Also this is really out of the question as I shouldn’t have to rely on my Laptop or another computer to download the content. Then transfer multiple gigabytes of data across the network just to watch a show. If this is how Apple solves problems for iTunes I might as well just use Amazon’s service or wait for the TV shows to come out on DVD.
They also need to pass this error to the Apple Software Engineers for iTunes as there are multiple complaints from people that are having the same problem. This isn’t just isolated to one or two customers. Another thing Apple needs to do is get rid of this Email Support as it fails at customer satisfaction. It has slow response times from the technicians and it just makes customers angry that the problem isn’t resolved. It is apparent that the iTunes Support Team is clueless, and they only rehash canned responses that have nothing to do with the actual problem.
In short the current timeline is the second iTunes Rep contacted me 9 days after the original ticket was submitted. The First support tech didn’t do anything after first contact on December 6, 2009 (48 hours). In four days it will be 14 days, which is really too long to continue to have this problem with so little response from Apple iTunes Support Team. I’ll be checking my email constantly through the coming days to see if there is an actual response to resolve this problem.
