I took my MacBook Pro in to the Apple Store today. For some reason, I am always nervous when going anywhere for tech support. In general, I am a tech-savvy guy who knows exactly what he is talking about. When dealing with tech support, though, I always go into it feeling like I will be put on trial. “You think this is broken? Prove it!” “I don’t care that it was crashing yesterday. It’s perfectly functional now.” This rarely, if ever, ends up being the case–but it still lurks in the back of my mind and makes me nervous. I always have to write up detailed notes and refer back to them.
The Genius Bar folks at the Apple Store really make the situation painless. I consciously know this, but it doesn’t help my initial mood when going in there. Having AppleCare greatly improves the situation, too. It’s like you have Carte Blanche or something. “Oh, you have AppleCare? Well, let’s just replace a few more things while we’re at it.”
At any rate, it was relatively painless. I walked in, made the first available appointment (40 minutes), grabbed a sandwich from a nearby eatery, then returned to explain the situation. There was no berading or having to prove anything. In fact, the motherboard was so hosed that the guy couldn’t get the machine to boot from his external diagnostic hard drive without a kernel panic.
Parts are ordered; they are arriving Friday. ’till then I am without my laptop, which is my primary machine. It’s what I use to download podcasts and sync them with my phone. I have already determined that trying to sync a Linux box to an older Apple-formatted iPod Nano is neigh impossible. I guess I’ll have to find a good way to listen to podcasts until then. Listening on the computer just doesn’t do it for me–I listen in the car and away from the desk a lot, plus I like having a physical pause button to hit rather than dealing with UI and latency on an overworked desktop machine.
For podcasts, I highly recommend the Podcaster webapp: http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/podcaster_home.html
Holy crap! That’s now on my home-screen. That beats the pants off of the four or five Linux-based apps I’ve looked at today. A few of the Linux apps were able to download podcasts to my desktop machine (the scary thing is that most couldn’t–or at least couldn’t before I gave up on trying to fiddle with them), but none were able to get stuff on to my 1st generation Nano or iPhone. With just one URL, they’re now all on the phone.
I’m not sure that this will work while driving. I usually switch to Airplane Mode because my stereo is susceptible to the BztBztBzt GSM noise, but I guess I’ll see how annoying it is. It kicks ass while around the office, though.
I have my PowerBook G4 still alive after a water spill, while under AppleCare. They couldn’t find evidence of the spill, and agreed that my motherboard was hosed (heh). So at about 6 months before AppleCare expired, I got a $700+ new motherboard installed.
That was months ago. Last week, I knocked it off the counter and KILLED DEAD my 60G hard drive. (Fortunately, backed up the day before) So I pulled the HD, replaced it with my leftover 40G drive that I’d saved from my long-gone Pismo PB, and now I’m in the market for a Macbook Pro.
Looks like we’re days away from a new release, so I’m holding my breath. So far this year, Apple’s released a new product on every Tuesday, I think. MBP oughta be soon…
Good to hear that your Apple Store experience was a good one. With no Apple Store within 800 miles of here, I had to rely on a pretty cool Apple reseller/service depot called Mac Helper in nearby Winnipeg. I took my Macbook in tonight to get a casing crack fixed, and I was in and out within 10 minutes, no questions asked, service request still under warranty. It was the most pleasurable computer service experience of my life.