Mac Geekery

In the course of the day, virtually every customer I would encounter will ask me if anything new is coming out, what I think about the rumor recently posted on some blog, when Apple will finally make another PDA, or when Apple will fix a bug “everyone on the Discussion boards is having.” Such questions are a veritable minefield because, while wearing the the Genius shirt, we’re not supposed to speculate. It so happens that anything we say is speculation, as we don’t know anything. At all.

Apple is a markedly closed-lipped company, this everyone knows. Apple engages in what is called ‘spherical branding.’ The company presents a united front to the public, such that in most regards you have roughly the same experience regardless of which specific worker bee you happen to be speaking to. By presenting this united front, though, the public begins to treat Apple as something roughly Borg like, assuming that every worker bee knows about the product and support roadmaps. Reality is vastly different.There's more »

I’m all about throwing more fuel on the fire, but many would tell you that I’m not good at starting a fire of my own. Apparently, I buy diesel by the truckload and keep leaving the matches at home. Last month, the codepoet posited his position on Apple selling OS X for Beige Hardware and had a lot of good reasons for why he felt they won’t. Others have given their reasons for why they think it’s in Apple’s future. No one on either side of the issue seems to remember one key fact, though.

Most computer buyers don’t spend a single dollar on their computer after the initial purchase.

It’s a fact you can live by. Ask around your family and poll some friends. You’ll find a few geeks, nerds, and some not-so-nerdy and not-so-geeky who will buy a shareware program here and there, or a cable from time to time, but as a rule people do not spend much money on existing hardware.There's more »

Customers frequently leave enough of an impression that they receive nicknames, even if we never see them again. To this day, I can’t even remember why The Teacher was in my store, nor even what kind of computer she had. Occasionally we encounter people who… aren’t quite right. However, usually they’re in the store to bug us about people supposedly hacking their computers. The evidence is always something inane like, “I know it’s happening because this ‘system.log’ file is growing even though I’m not doing anything!” Not The Teacher, though. She seemed perfectly normal up until she saw a child using one of the computers in the Kids section.There's more »

After working somewhere for six years, you get used to the machinations of that job, and the more repetitive aspects become like addictions. There are many reasons I may need to call a customer as a Genius; your repair is complete, we need more information from you, or there has been a significant change in status for your repair. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve uttered the following into a customer’s voicemail:

Hi, this is Jeremy at the AppleStore…There's more »

I love Front Row. No amount of AppleScripting, Cocoa hacking, and VLC tweaking comes even remotely close to the elegance, beauty, or ease of use that Front Row brings to my living room. Apple’s recent inclusion of Bonjour networking to collect all of your home’s media into one interface has added even more to the equation, as you can now view any media in your home without having to go through the trouble of copying it from one machine to another – a big deal when you just used your G5 to encode a handful of DVDs and want to watch them on the TV.

With this elegance, beauty, and ease of use comes simplicity. Simplicity is a beauty in its own right, but it usually comes bundled with an uglier cousin – lack of features. Front Row does your MPEG-compatible movie formats, your iPhoto library, your Music, and your DVDs. Beyond that, it does nothing. Not a damned thing.There's more »

Dealing with unrealistic expectations is as much, if not moreso, a part of being a Genius as is general Mac troubleshooting. Customers demand all sorts of things silly, idiotic, or worse. They want special treatment, because they assume none of our other customers have business critical machines. They demand replacements because it’s not reasonable to accept a single hardware failure in a year. They demand on-the-spot replacement of a module that is out-of-stock, and then demand to speak to a manager, as managers are well known for rectally-expelling physical goods on command. When reality sets in that, in fact, a manager’s arse does not house a wormhole to the warehouse on the other side of the continent, they then demand a replacement computer, since “tomorrow” is too long to wait.There's more »

A well trained Genius relishes the difficult customer, and none are more difficult than the customer who feels he should not have to pay to fix the PowerBook he dropped. Be it a dinged case or cracked LCD, he will come up with some bizarre story about how it was not his fault and he should not have to pay for it.

Just so we are clear here, when we talk about LCDs, we are talking about a liquid suspended between a several sheets of polarized glass the thickness of a human hair. Of the possible variations in thickness that still leave us with a functional LCD... none will stand up to you dropping the thing on a corner or closing the lid with a pen on the keyboard any better than the others.

It’s Apple’s fault for not building it to withstand being dropped 6 inches.

I dunno, I just looked down and it was suddenly cracked!There's more »

Everyone knows that I’m a great fan of the Mac mini. If you don’t, know this now. I bought one of the very first ones to arrive at my store, too impatient to wait for it to be available at employee prices, and have set it up in my entertainment center. At the time, Apple was billing the Mac mini as a second computer for potential Switchers to try out before plopping down some serious jack on an iMac. But I saw it for what it was and, after the release of the newest Mac mini, what it was to become.

Everyone’s crazy about how the Mac mini is the center of your home entertainment center, but I’ve gone further and made it the center of my home’s network. My mini runs OS X Server and provides Mobile Homes to my other Macs. There will be no data lost in this house. It stores my music, movies encoded from DVD for instant access, and is connected to my TV as well as having VLC set to multicast stream video-on-demand to other machines in the house. It does it all.There's more »

(Deep Breath) I am a Mac Genius.

Well, I was a Mac Genius. Today is my last day. After six years at Apple, four as a Mac Genius, I turned in my badge today and entered the realm of the self employed. I joined Apple Retail in its infancy, when it was scarcely a year old. Many of my friends and co-workers took part in its top-secret gestation and birth. Typical for Apple, I had no idea what they were working on until the rest of the world found out. Before I knew it, I was in Cupertino myself, going through Apple’s famous yet scarcely understood Mac Genius training program. Looking back, the period of time between being hired as a Mac Genius and my first store’s grand opening (eight weeks) seems like an amazingly long training period. At the time, it felt like a crash course.There's more »