Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

The Lonely Apple Repairman?

Filed under
Mac

I'm convinced there will never be a lonely Apple Computer repairman.

What finally persuaded me was my experience last week with the folks Apple calls the "geniuses." Now, let me hasten to add one note. I strongly suspect they are in fact geniuses--especially Charlie at Apple's New York store in SoHo, who may be one of the smartest and most reassuring major electronics repair guys I've every run across.

Still, Charlie and his fellow geniuses made my experience only marginally less maddening. Last Monday evening, my 17-month-old iMac G4 died. When I say "die" I mean it was so dead that not even a flatline appeared on my screen. When I finally got through to an 800-number repair guru, and after I made him understand why I couldn't access their 24-hour online tech help, he confessed that my problem was clearly "hardware related" and was beyond his capabilities.

So shortly after 6 AM Tuesday morning, there I was humping my iMac G4 into Apple's SoHo store--its only physical location in New York City. At the "Genius Bar" on the second floor, an eponymous genius looked at it and conceded that it was broken. "Probably the power supply," he nodded gravely.

I breathed a slight sigh of relief when he quoted me a price that was not much more than dinner for two at the neighboring Mercer Kitchen (attached to the Mercer Hotel where Russell Crowe heaved a telephone at a receptionist, an incident which, had I not known better, I might have thought was touched off by his experience next door at the Apple Store).

As the genius was filling out the repair slip, I spotted a printed notice on a board next to where they performed their miracles. It pledged that computers arriving before 8 AM would be ready the same day. Great, I thought. By Tuesday night I'll be back online, cruising the Web and making sure Forbes.com was everything it should be and more.

Wrong.

By the next morning--28 hours after checking iMac into the Genius Bar, Apple's Web site still had my link with the outside world "in triage." Triage? At any hospital, if a patient were still in triage 28 hours after arriving at the hospital, administers would be flying out the door--sacked. Some of the patients would be dead, others would have cured themselves by then and headed home.

An Apple customer service operator explained patiently that the delay was to order a part and have it shipped in, so it probably wouldn't be ready for another week. Another week? Pretty basic, it seems to me--a power supply for what is arguably one of the most popular desktops from Apple in its history. OK, I understand shipping it in. But another week? I mean, UPS and FedEx have made a pretty good business out of getting just about anything from anywhere in the U.S. to anywhere else the next day.

I offered to pay extra for overnight shipping of the part but was told that wouldn't get me my computer any quicker.

Fortunately, I had some phone numbers for some Apple people in Cupertino, Calif., and a couple of phone calls later the wheels were slowly grinding into motion.

"Your experience shouldn't happen to any Apple customer," explained a company spokeswoman. Darn right. Only most people wouldn't have her cell phone number. And indeed, I was by no means alone.

Even at 6:30 that Tuesday morning, there were already several frantic Apple-owners clutching laptops and iPods, waiting to drop them off for repair. Thursday evening, 60 hours after my wife and I first walked up to the Genius Bar, we went back finally to claim our iMac that by this time had been impeccably fixed--they even buffed up the screen thoroughly. And at 6:30 Thursday evening, I counted more than 100 Macniacs queued up, some lugging huge PowerMac G5s, waiting their turn at the Genius Bar.

I'll concede it's probably a little unfair to single out Apple in all this. A Forbes.com colleague pointed out to me that on a recent visit to Best Buy, she saw scores of PC users queuing up at the repair counter clutching their ailing links with the online universe.

So that got me to thinking about the broader question. Twenty-five years after the first PC, the desktop and the laptop are still not nearly as reliable as the most basic automobile, washing machine, refrigerator or, even closer to home, television for that matter. When was the last time you brought your 36-inch color TV into a repair shop? Shouldn't we expect, even demand, better reliability?

I've gone through three computers (a Compaq, Gateway and now iMac) in the ten years since I bought my 36-inch Sony TV. Somehow it just quietly keeps chugging along, anesthetizing me without a single thought.

By David A. Andelman
Forbes

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.