My Trip To The Omaha Apple Store
shoemoney
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5 min read
One Month ago today I Drove 70 Miles to the Omaha Apple Store to purchase a brand new Macbook Pro for myself. The 15" model 2.53GHZ with 4GB ram.
I could have went to the best buy 5 minutes away from my house to buy the same computer but we have a corporate discount code with Apple and we only get to use it for purchases at the Apple store. Its not a ton of money but in the last year its saved us at least $25,000.00.
So anyway I get back to Lincoln and fire up the laptop. I played around with it a little bit but I had to fly out the next day to go to Phoenix so I did not get much time to play with it.
5 days later I get home from phoenix and finally have a minute to try to migrate stuff over from my Macbook AIR to the new Macbook Pro. Being the Macbook AIR does not have a firewire port my only option was to migrate over a wireless network. This did not go so well and I had to abandon ship midway through. 2 days later my Elite Retreat conference started and so I put off the migration until I got back from that.
7 days later I finally get to play with my new laptop. As I am copying things over though the machine keeps locking up for 5-10 minutes at a time.. WTF? Not cool. I check the system log in /var/logs/system.log and it shows a disk IO error every time the machine comes back from one of these lockups. I start researching the issue online and find a few helpful threads on the Apple support forums. I tried everything....... even reformatting the drive zeroing out the data so it will move the bad blocks (WTF BAD BLOCKS) on the hard drive.
So after 2 reinstall and only about 10 hours of actual use (of which 9 was reinstalling/formatting) I am f'ing pissed off. Not really because the computer is DOA... but because after calling the Apple store they tell me there is nothing they can do for me over the phone and I need to set a meeting with one of their "geniuses" at the "genius" bar so he can take a look at it and figure out whats wrong.
OK THAT SUCKS. Guess what is going to happen? I can already picture it. I am taking 4 hours out of my Saturday to drive to the Omaha Apple Store to sit down with some high school kid who thinks he knows everything cause he just got his MCSE. He is going to do all these retarded tests and tell me nothing is wrong with it and I am going to go back and fourth to the Omaha store for the next month. Nevermind the fact I have been a UNIX admin and Apple user since this pimple faced kid was born AND I KNOW exactly without a doubt its a bad hard drive.
Well I scheduled an appointment with one of these "Geniuses" for this morning. I talked to my wife last night and told her how much I WAS NOT looking forward to the trip and how this kid is going to super piss me and yadda yadda yadda and she told me, "just chill and let them do their job". Now I had no experience with Apple "geniuses" before but was just going by my experience with every local chain like Best Buy, Circut City, or remote support like Dell where their answers drive you insane with things like "Have you rebooted?"
I had my appointment at 11am... checked in the store and sat down at the "genius" bar. A kid named Chase came over to me and asked me what was going on with my laptop. I explained that it randomly locks up for 5-10 minutes and everything I had done to try and fix it. He asked if he could check it out for a minute. Right away it locked up on him and he checked the system log which showed the disk IO error.
He then said, "Man I really apologize I bet this was frustrating. Would it be OK if I just get you a brand new laptop?"
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WOAH... I was not expecting that. He went into the backroom to check on something and came out and said there was a issue. (O boy).
He said that they were out of the same model that I had but would it be ok if he went ahead and upgraded me to the new 2.66GHZ model (which is about 400$ more)? I said sure and what I just pay the difference in price? And he said no no we will just do a even swap is that OK?
I just was about knocked over with this. Unreal customer service.
So I know what some of you are thinking. They did this because we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with them....
OR because they knew about Davids macbook pro birthday cake my wife made that got lots of mainstream press including some attention of some Apple execs...
OR because they must have read the post about Best Buy that was featured on the 20/20 show about how people complained about crap customer service and got stuff done.
Nope. All Chase knew was that I was Jeremy and that's it.
On the way home from the Apple store I called my wife and told her about my amazing experience. I also said I felt bad not only for prejudging the "geniuses" but also putting myself through such agony...
I left the Apple Store feeling more proud then ever to be an Apple user. Thanks Chase!
7 days later I finally get to play with my new laptop. As I am copying things over though the machine keeps locking up for 5-10 minutes at a time.. WTF? Not cool. I check the system log in /var/logs/system.log and it shows a disk IO error every time the machine comes back from one of these lockups. I start researching the issue online and find a few helpful threads on the Apple support forums. I tried everything....... even reformatting the drive zeroing out the data so it will move the bad blocks (WTF BAD BLOCKS) on the hard drive.
So after 2 reinstall and only about 10 hours of actual use (of which 9 was reinstalling/formatting) I am f'ing pissed off. Not really because the computer is DOA... but because after calling the Apple store they tell me there is nothing they can do for me over the phone and I need to set a meeting with one of their "geniuses" at the "genius" bar so he can take a look at it and figure out whats wrong.
OK THAT SUCKS. Guess what is going to happen? I can already picture it. I am taking 4 hours out of my Saturday to drive to the Omaha Apple Store to sit down with some high school kid who thinks he knows everything cause he just got his MCSE. He is going to do all these retarded tests and tell me nothing is wrong with it and I am going to go back and fourth to the Omaha store for the next month. Nevermind the fact I have been a UNIX admin and Apple user since this pimple faced kid was born AND I KNOW exactly without a doubt its a bad hard drive.
Well I scheduled an appointment with one of these "Geniuses" for this morning. I talked to my wife last night and told her how much I WAS NOT looking forward to the trip and how this kid is going to super piss me and yadda yadda yadda and she told me, "just chill and let them do their job". Now I had no experience with Apple "geniuses" before but was just going by my experience with every local chain like Best Buy, Circut City, or remote support like Dell where their answers drive you insane with things like "Have you rebooted?"
I had my appointment at 11am... checked in the store and sat down at the "genius" bar. A kid named Chase came over to me and asked me what was going on with my laptop. I explained that it randomly locks up for 5-10 minutes and everything I had done to try and fix it. He asked if he could check it out for a minute. Right away it locked up on him and he checked the system log which showed the disk IO error.
He then said, "Man I really apologize I bet this was frustrating. Would it be OK if I just get you a brand new laptop?"
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WOAH... I was not expecting that. He went into the backroom to check on something and came out and said there was a issue. (O boy).
He said that they were out of the same model that I had but would it be ok if he went ahead and upgraded me to the new 2.66GHZ model (which is about 400$ more)? I said sure and what I just pay the difference in price? And he said no no we will just do a even swap is that OK?
I just was about knocked over with this. Unreal customer service.
So I know what some of you are thinking. They did this because we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with them....
OR because they knew about Davids macbook pro birthday cake my wife made that got lots of mainstream press including some attention of some Apple execs...
OR because they must have read the post about Best Buy that was featured on the 20/20 show about how people complained about crap customer service and got stuff done.
Nope. All Chase knew was that I was Jeremy and that's it.
On the way home from the Apple store I called my wife and told her about my amazing experience. I also said I felt bad not only for prejudging the "geniuses" but also putting myself through such agony...
I left the Apple Store feeling more proud then ever to be an Apple user. Thanks Chase!