John P.

I had to replace the screen of my 16" MacBook Pro bought Dec 2021 after a freak accident 6/3/2022 broke it. The Cirencester store where I bought it said, for quick turnround take it in person to the big Apple store in central Bristol, which I did. The repair centre ("Genius Bar") gave price £674.14 + VAT but the paperwork from their billing software, see attached photos, is laid out like this:___Description________Price_____Amount Due___Damage MBP 16"___£674.17___£809.00________________VAT__________£161.80________________Total__________£970.80
So the basic price is £674.17, adding VAT at 20% brings it to £809.00 but then the software has added VAT at 20% a second time bringing it to £970.80.
I queried this saying my insurance company would not accept it. I spoke to a supervisor who said this was a "glitch" and gave me signed confirmation that the price I would pay was £809. I have the machine back now and that is indeed what I paid.
This double VAT-ing is produced by the repair billing software of a large UK store of one of the world's largest companies. Would it happen out of the blue on Tue 8 Mar 2022 to a random customer in Bristol? I believe it is systemic.
Maybe they think that when the total is less, a customer will just not notice, but here they were trying to inflate the cost by a whopping £160 odd.
I spoke to an adviser at Which? Legal which I'm a member of. Their opinion was that such double VAT-ing is illegal.
If anyone else has had the same experience with an Apple repair I look forward to hear about it.
Finally:
The MacBook itself is a good product and I'm very happy with it. The staff at the Apple store were personally helpful and courteous.

I've had Carbonite on my MacBook for some years and a few times used it to recover lost files so the fact that it seemed to get "stuck" on some files, and I needed their tech staff to fix this remotely, was something I'ld forgive.
Not any more. On 26 June 2021 it stopped backing up. Each time I pressed "resume" it immediately stopped. No help from tech staff who just pointed me to their FAQs pages.
Mysteriously the MacBook's 250 Gb hard drive was being used up. Four weeks after 26 June it filled up completely, I couldn't open Mail or even TextEdit. I didn't suspect Carbonite at the time but...
At the local Apple store, a staff member overviewed disk usage with a tool called DaisyDisk. He found the Carbonite program (client) had written 113.4 Gb of error messages to a log file—without ever telling the folk back at Carbonite server-side that something was wrong. There was no disk space to make a screenshot so I attach photos of the DaisyDisk display, that I took with my phone. He deleted the log and the machine came back to life.
Since I reported this, Carbonite staff have completely blanked me. There have been no responses to my emails, though I quoted Case number etc that had they issued me previously.
Carbonite might have offered an OK service once, but now—maybe the best is if we all help it to implode.