Just when I thought I couldn’t give the Apple Store any more money…
My wife, along with her partner, runs her own internet business where they sell paper crafting and stamping supplies. I am very proud of her. Anyway, she has been running her store on a PC box that has given us nothing but problems for the last year. I’ve replaced the video card, the sound card, the hard drive and just about everything else but the motherboard and the darned thing still blue screens despite our best efforts through re-installing windows and routine maintenance. Well everytime it dies on her she finds herself on my daughter’s iMac and it has made her a believer. So tonight she joined the growing legions of Mac users with her very own MacBook.
It is funny because the sales guy who set us up was the same guy who sold me my first Mac. I really like the great people at the Irvine Apple Store. It is of note how much easier this purchase was. When I bought my first Mac I was a bit worried about making a mistake. I need a computer every day for my work and Apple was a big leap for me. Buying my wife’s computer was not stressful at all. It is actually a relief to be free of all those PC blue screen problems.
I’ll spend this weekend tricking it out for her. She bought one of those red plastic protective cases on which she plans on doing some serious customization. I can’t wait to see what she does with it.
When I first bought my Mac, the Apple Store employees talked about the ProCare service. While I didn’t initially bite on it, after taking a few of the free courses I quickly realized there is a wealth of good information there. In addition the folks at the Irvine Spectrum Apple Store are all quite nice making spending time at the Genius Bar informative and fun. I went ahead and signed up for ProCare a few months ago (fortunately before Apple split it up into two services) Now having taken 4 or 5 classes I can report it is a good thing. I was pretty knowledgeable and my switch to the Mac was relatively painless. The Mac has really opened up the fun side of computing for me with music, video and pictures. I’m finding the genius bar appointments extremely helpful in learning all this media fun. The Genius’ enthusiasm towards Apple software is infectious and could end up costing you a few bucks in new software you didn’t even know existed. My report card on ProCare so far, A+.
I ran into my first real Mac snag this week. For some reason the .Mac service was acting very wonky. When I booted up the .Mac synchronization was not available. In the .Mac preference pane the “sync” and “advanced” buttons were greyed out. While I could some times prod them into activity most of the time I could not. I spent about an hour doing google searches and monkeying with this problem until it occured to me I drive right past an Apple store on my way home so I decided to see what the Genius Bar made of it.
A few hours later I found myself sitting at the counter in the Irvine Apple store while a very nice “Genius” told me I had somehow managed to corrupt one of my settings. She simply pulled my “Library” folder onto the desktop and the Mac fixed itself. This did require me to do a bit of legwork in a few programs to reset everything but the Store employee did most of that for me and told me that if I ran into any more problems to just stop back and she would sort it out for me.
This is something new for me. I’m used to PC vendors who forget you exist the moment the register says “approved” and funds have transferred. I’m very pleased with this experience and thinking that ProCare might not be such a bad idea after all.
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