Broke my hard drive, refuse to pay, lying about the service call I made

I sent in my Macbook Pro to iStore South Africa (via Somerset West store) for a battery replacement and soon afterwards the hard-drive began crashing occasionally, and then gradually more frequently. Eventually it failed altogether. I called the iStore South Africa Service Centre to ask about the cost of a new hard drive and was told in no uncertain terms "we don't replace any hard drives any more". I was astonished by this and pressed the point, asking if that means I must throw away a R55,000 laptop which is only 4 years old. The agent was unmoved and adamant that they don't ever replace any hard drives.

So I called Apple Support on their 0800 number with this feedback and they said to try DigiCape, who did indeed replace the drive and reported that "the SSD is faulty due to loose Logic Board ***** below the SSD". They confirmed that this ***** would need to have been removed by iStore to perform the battery replacement a few months earlier.

I concluded that iStore was at fault for not tightening this ***** and thus gradually destroying my hard drive and so I went back to them. Their response has been appalling: arrogant, evasive, delaying and totally dishonest. They now claim that they WOULD have replaced the drive if I had sent the unit to them (probably at my cost?), but since I went to Digicape it is now not their problem!

For over a month they have refused to listen to the service call in question where I was told that replacing the drive was impossible for iStore; pretending that the call record does not exist / "searching" for calls from numbers other than the one I provided to them!! Even after I have sent them documentary PROOF of my call records showing the date, time and duration of the call to their service centre on 22nd July, they are still trying to pretend I never spoke to them!! Now that I have provided the proof they just don't answer any emails and the Somerset West iStore (from whom I have bought many Apple products) is also totally ignoring this issue. Be warned: don't ever deal with iStore again, Digicape is way better (as you can see from the reviews here on Hello Peter.