An Apple customer, only known as APPLENEWBIE, sent in his sons computer for repair (the computer wouldn’t turn on) but when he got the computer back it had someone else’s hard drive inside with all their personal data still on it. The resulting story, the timeline for which I have laid out below, is a testament to how Web 2.0 and the concepts of Wikinomics are shifting more power to the consumer.

Thursday Feb 15th 6:12pm – APPLENEWBIE makes a post on a Mac forum asking the community how to format his drive, also explaining the switched hard drive situation. They community quickly reminds him that the other person would want there data back, and also advises him of the security risks involved with having his hard drive in someone else’s possession.

Friday Feb 16th – Taking the advice of the community he contacts an Apple customer service rep, but the best solution they come up with is to format the drive (at which point he finds out that the drive he received back is only a 60gb not the 80gb version he originally had). APPLENEWBIE then updates the community of the situation and gets more help form other users.

Sunday Feb 18th 10:00am – After a couple more failed attempts by APPLENEWBIE to get any sort of appropriate resolution from Apple a forum users decides to post the story on digg.com so that the company will be forced to address the issue. The story recived over 2,000 diggs in a little over 4 hours and was on the sites front page. Bloggers then started picking up the story and it even appeared on sites such as ZDNet.

Sunday Feb 18th 7:00pm – All the publicity gave Apple a change of heart and our poorly serviced Mac user is now being offered a solution to his problem. He stated in his last post that “I was just contacted by a nice lady from Apple who was very apologetic about all this, and will work with us to get this sorted out. She was very surprised about my conversation earlier today with the service person who said nothing could be done. Apple has apparently also been in touch with the other party.” You can monitor his progress in the forum.

This is an interesting story on how the web can enable not only a community of support, but be leveraged to make a major company take note of a serious problem that may have otherwise been ignored.