Similar experience in Perth, Australia. Apple is vastly more popular in 2019 than they were in 2009, so the magical Apple experience of seeing someone immediately & getting a while-you-wait repair is gone [1]. Even the appointment system is just choosing a time when you're allowed to come into the store to wait for half an hour until someone is available. They really need more stores & more staff, but that would eat into Apple's profits.
The one difference I've had is that I'm not even getting my issues resolved anymore. (Full sob story is in my comment history.) I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X1 and gave up on Apple after 15 years.
[1] Does anyone else remember when Apple would give you a coffee voucher for a local cafe while you were waiting, and send you a txt message to come back to the store once your MacBook Pro was fixed or replaced? They used to be magical, and they could afford to do all that because the machines were built for life & repairs were rare. That's all gone now.
There are now 900M iPhone users and 100M Mac users and 200M iPad users, while some may be overlap, there is give or take 1 Billion users Apple potentially serve. And yet they still only have 500 Stores, with more than half of them in US. So in terms of users and Store distribution US has a much better Ratio, and hence the favourable experience in the two previous reply, coming from US.
A long time ago ( I think it was 2015 ) I had expected Apple to reach 1000 Apple Store Worldwide by 2020. But just like every part of their infrastructure, ( CDN, Datacentre, Solar Energy, Recycling etc ) their "Asset-Light" strategy, being extremely conservative with any Asset has hold them back.
The one difference I've had is that I'm not even getting my issues resolved anymore. (Full sob story is in my comment history.) I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X1 and gave up on Apple after 15 years.
[1] Does anyone else remember when Apple would give you a coffee voucher for a local cafe while you were waiting, and send you a txt message to come back to the store once your MacBook Pro was fixed or replaced? They used to be magical, and they could afford to do all that because the machines were built for life & repairs were rare. That's all gone now.