After about 5 months of low usage of my Beats Solo2 Wireless, the sound on the left earpiece sometimes died away or had complete dropouts. I called the Beats support and, of course ended up with the Apple support, as Beats belongs to Apple for some time now. First thing they instructed me to do was a reset of the headphones. This seemed to resolve the problem for the moment, but it kept coming back. On my next call I mentioned, that slightly wiggling the left earpiece affected the behaviour and that I therefore believe, that this is probably a hardware problem. The advisor told me, that the system for creating a repair request was currently under maintainance and I’ll get a call later. When this call arrived, I was not at home. This was the third call for this topic and of course I was speaking with yet another adviser. He told me, that first a firmware update must be made, if the problem remains, of course a repair would be initiated. So a 4th call was scheduled for the next day. 5 minutes later, I received a call, informing me, that a callback option could not be set as stipulated before. I had to call on my own the next day. Later, when I was at home, I was able to arrange a callback on the desired date and time through the website.
Next day, call #5: Downloaded and ran the Beats updater, just to receive the answer, that my firmware is up to date. Finally, the repair request was initiated.
Again, one day later, I received an empty package for sending in my Beats. In the past, I had already sent in an iPod and an iPhone this way, and always the package was specialized with a foam inlet fitting exactly for the product. Not this time. The headphones had to be squeezed below a foil, causing the pads of the earpiece to deform.
The package was brought by Hermes delivery service, the sticker for the return said Hermes as well, but on the back, there was an UPS logo. In the enclosed manual (yes, there is a manual for packaging and sending the product) they were saying, that for Germany, transportation is done by TNT. I was completely confused.
Next I called TNT to arrange the picking up, but they were clueless. They had no information from Apple on my case. Calling Apple again … for the 6th time. Now I got the information about a misprint in the manual. TNT is not in charge of these transports in Germany, it is indeed Hermes. So, the package is on its way to Apples repair center in the Netherlands now. I am curious how the story goes on.
To be continued …