Apple Store - West Edmonton Mall

[noodle]

There may be spots that seem like a rant in here (and it's REAALLY long), but all in all I had an amazing experience, no matter how frustrating it may have been at times.

First, some background: I purchased my first-generation 24" iMac in October of 2006. In mid 2008 I started having some problems with my graphics card/display. I'd get corruption if I pushed it too hard for too long, and if I wasn't careful it'd crash. I had ~18 months on my AppleCare left, so I called in, went through the motions and the Genius at the other end of the line finally concedes that I'll need to bring it in and schedules me an appointment at the Apple Store. Genius takes one look at it at the store and promptly orders me a replacement mainboard, LCD panel and LVDS system to basically gut my iMac to ensure it's fixed. As the parts weren't in stock and my mac was still mostly usable, they sent me home with my mac to await arrival. 5 days later they called me and told me to bring in my mac, I dropped it off mid-afternoon Sunday and picked it up Tuesday afternoon and everything was perfect!

...or so I thought. Within a month or two I started to get the corruption again, but not the crashing. My photography business had progressed to the point I couldn't really spare my mac so I kinda learned to live with it. It wasn't as common as before, but still not perfect.

Fast forward about a year. Earlier this summer the crashing came back, with a vengance. I scheduled some time off of work for my fall trip to Vancouver, and decided I would use the vacation time to get the iMac fixed again. I called Apple, advised them the same issue was back, informed them I had already jumped through the hoops they had me go through the previous year, once again to no avail. Once again, an appointment was made to the Genius Bar and the day before I left for Vancouver I trudged to the Apple Store hauling my beloved iMac (September 15th). The Genius once again immediately diagnosed the issue and went to the back to check for parts. This time I was lucky, they had the parts in stock, but the service queue was rather long, so I was warned it could take "a few days". I commented that I was off to Vancouver for a week and really could get by without it for the weekend following my return, so a few days was no problem. With that, my iMac was whisked away.

I get back from Vancouver, and no mention from Apple regarding my repair. I wait until it's been ~10 days and give them a call. The chipper young gentleman on the phone informs me that yes, they have my iMac, that it is firmly in the queue, that they have the parts and that it'll be done when it's done. I push for something more definitive, but to no avail. I hang up frustrated, but aware that my computer is going to be fixed...sometime.

Almost a week later I get a call from Apple that I can't take. Upon checking my voicemail I'm greeted with the following "Dear Mr. Noodle, this is Jamie from the Apple Store. We're just calling in regards to the options for fixing your iMac. The parts required to fix it are still on back order. We expect delivery within 48 hours, and a further 3-4 business days to make the repairs. If you could give me a call back I'd appreciate it. Oh, I also need the specifications for your iMac."

WHAT. THE. F$&K? Options? It's a warranty repair! Another week? You said you had the parts! Specifications? YOU HAVE MY MAC. You tell me what the specs are. It was bought from you!

I return the call. I launch into an expletive filled rant regarding the service, the confusion regarding "a few days" now being "a couple of weeks" with a further week to wait, the parts being in and out of stock simultaneously and the lack of transparency. Jamie interjects and informs me that the part has arrived, that my iMac is currently being stripped down for repairs and would be ready for pickup the next day, and that she needed my iMac specifications as they had decided to deem my iMac a lemon for needing the same repair twice, and in compensation for this (and the delay), they were attempting to locate an equivalent model.

I breathe in and rattle off the specs for my iMac. She puts me on hold to attempt to locate a system I can swap to. She returns with good news: my iMac hasn't been made in years, and as such the only thing available is a current model. She even selects a model that reflects the equivalent upgrades I had purchased back in 2006 (I had upped the RAM and videocard, she upped the RAM and videocard in my 2009 model, even though the base amounts were more than I had upgraded to previously). I am informed that it'll take a couple of weeks for the store to get one in, as they're backordered, but my current (now-fixed) iMac will be available as a "loaner" in the interim. I thank her profusely for handling the situation and eagerly await my new, faster, aluminum 24" iMac.

I never ever get that iMac. I pick up my iMac the next day, and have zero problems with it.

2 weeks turns into 3 weeks and all of a sudden, the 24" iMacs aren't made any more. They now make 27" iMacs. As the end of the window closes for the initial delivery of my replacement and the emails begin anew. Where is my machine? Why the delay? Jamie responds back in a timely manner, informs me that the iMac they had promised me cannot be delivered, and instead I would get a base model 27", far exceeding my old iMac. But not exceeding the upgraded iMac they had promised me. I email back to Jamie noting the discrepancy, hoping that they'd toss in the videocard upgrade to reach parity with the original swap offer.

Apple then, as a courtesy for all my time and effort, offers me an upgrade to a quad-core iMac, gratis. But I've got to wait until November sometime for it. But at this point it's October 28th, and how bad can the wait really be? My original machine is running like a top, zero problems or crashes no matter how hard I beat on it. I'm not actually out anything by waiting. So I accept the new offer and wait. And wait. And wait.

December 1 rolls around. No iMac. I email again. Jamie responds that my machine got lost in the order system somewhere and they can't find it. She's located an equivalent machine in Winnipeg and will have it overnighted. I'm elated. I fell through the cracks, true, but every time I've piped up they've addressed my concerns. Not perfect, but solid B+ service. December 2 I get an email informing me the machine's available for swapping. I rush home after work, format my machine, unplug all the peripherals and shove my ancient iMac back into the original box from whence it sprung, 3 years prior. Off to the Apple Store I rush, completing the transaction and hurrying home. Only to find a 7" crack across the front of the screen. Ugh.


I call the store, 15 minutes before closing. I inform them of the issue, of the 11 week wait I've been subjected to and the fact that I gave them a perfectly working mac in exchange for the busted one they gave me. I do this using 95% 4 letter words. They explain that there's no more of my model in Western Canada, and that since it's so late they can't even check the system to see how close the next one is. I explain very succinctly that I expect to have the computer I was promised no later than Friday.

13 hours later, at the start of business the next day, I am informed another iMac has been located and is being brought in for me. After work, we once again head to the Apple Store for an iMac swap, experiencing geeky deja vu. We crack the box in the store, inspect the screen and conclude the transaction. The Genius even found a reciept I misplaced from July 2008 that I needed to exchange a 3rd party product with the manufacturer.

It may have taken longer than anyone had forecasted, but Apple swapped out my well-loved but more-abused iMac with 10 DAYS left on the warranty for a $2100, brand-new, drastically more capable machine. For free. Every time I called full of ****, vinegar and rage, they handled it with far more cool and confidence than I would have (and I work in Customer Service). Kudos to Apple, and Apple Store WEM.

(The swap from one machine to another was made as painless as possible through the use of Time Machine. 40 minutes after first boot my new iMac was a clone of the machine I erased 2 days prior, with my full Time Machine archive converted. Awesome.)

[jstock]

Used to work there. The management team is psychotic and rude to employees but very good to customers. I disagree with the lack of cash registers in the store and the lack of staff but otherwise the customer service is amazing.
Enjoy your new computer!

[armin]

First off, why do you use a mac for a personal computer/ business computer if you're working freelance? AppleCare is notorious for sucking the soul out of consumers.
Maybe 10 years ago when Mac was still relevent to the design industry, it'd be worth keeping but not now. Switching to cheaply made products and using an intel core makes it a glorified Dell.

Bench tests for a PC that costs half the price are easily comparable to Mac, plus you can swap parts much easier. I had a power supply go bad a few weeks ago. I had it fixed under 10 minutes, under warranty. Color management is no longer an issue with Mac versus PC since you can load in any profile you want.

The only good things about mac is their 24" cinema displays. Those are nice. The rest is junk.

As for how you finally managed to get it resolved, good for you, but I have a lot of issues when companies will only fix things for the loudest or angriest people.
I remember at Blockbuster one time, this woman was the meanest, most spiteful woman I'd ever encountered. She was holding up the lineup while berating some poor cashier over something that was clearly her fault, yet Blockbuster caved and gave this woman free rentals. I'm not comparing you to her. Just the scenario.

[noodle]

I will. It's already proven to be a far snappier piece of kit than my old one. Last night as a torture test I had:

• Firefox open with ~15 tabs running
• Aperture doing a batch of processor-intensive geometry corrections to photos, monopolizing two cores at 100%
• iTunes streaming music from the NAS
• PS3 Mediaserver running on my iMac remuxing a HD .mkv into .mp4 and streaming it to the PS3 so my roomie could watch a movie

System never hiccoughed and remained as responsive as fresh from booting.

The stores were more heavily staffed due to the Xmas rush I'm sure and I've always found their whole Point of Sale system a little suspect, but evidently they're changing some of it up (moving from WindowsMobile based mobile terminals to ones based on the iPod Touch). I tend to buy tech stuff with credit cards for an extra level of buyer protection so I've never missed the registers.

[Chmilz]

Good story, though definitely not the norm!

I bought a brand new 2007 Fusion at Kentwood in July '07 and it was a lemon: drove like turd, was missing basic and optional parts, just an awful experience. After a couple months of trying to get the parts brought in and installed, and putting on 9,000km, I demanded a new vehicle. Within 2 days they had found an identical model in Vancouver, shipped it over, mounted the optional wing from my original vehicle, and had me in to do the swap. This time I did a much more thorough inspection and test drove it before taking it away. It was perfect, like they were two completely different models of car.

The overall sales experience was awful, but they bent over backwards for me at the end of the day and took back a car that likely was stripped for parts in the end.

[noodle]

Originally Posted by armin

Bench tests for a PC that costs half the price are easily comparable to Mac, plus you can swap parts much easier. I had a power supply go bad a few weeks ago. I had it fixed under 10 minutes, under warranty. Color management is no longer an issue with Mac versus PC since you can load in any profile you want.

The only good things about mac is their 24" cinema displays. Those are nice. The rest is junk.

I can't find anyone that makes a 27" monitor like the one I've got built into my iMac. It's certainly nicer than the 24" and 30" cinema displays Apple themselves make, and nicer than anything I've seen in a big-box store. (Professional 30" displays run a lot more than a Dell 30" My friend's LaCie is ~$4k)

Given that my iMac starts as a base model at a couple hundred bucks more than just a Dell 30" monitor ($1799 vs $1499), with 90% of the pixels on a much higher quality panel (and y'know, A COMPUTER thrown in), the whole hardware cost issue is a straw man. And the 27" iMacs have a bidirectional DisplayPort, ensuring I'll be able to use it as a display long after the computer inside has faded to obsolete.

I built my own PCs for years. During the dotcom boom I got my MCSE. My last rig before I switched was a watercooled SLI rig with more blinkenlights and tweaks and mods than you could shake a LAN party at. I got tired of working ON my computer, and decided to switch. Controlling the entire system from hardware to software to services allows a much finer degree of control to the entire product. Looking at hardware costs or color profiles as the reason for me to switch proves you have no idea why most Mac users switch.

(FYI: Tonight's chore will be getting it dualbooting Windows 7 so I can play some modern games. How many Dells can run Aperture to get some work done?)

[armin]

That's all software. Aperture is just a fancy photobrowser not much different than Bridge, which are both RAM sucking resource hogs.
You can dual boot a PC as well. Just partition part of a drive and away you go.

[noodle]

Yeah, you don't get it. Thanks for your feedback though. The Adobe equivalent to Aperture isn't Bridge, it's Lightroom, but thanks for playing.

If you know of a more efficient way to manage and edit thousands of photos taken every week besides a comprehensive workflow app like these two or others, please let me and the rest of the photographers in the world know, so we can switch away from our "RAM sucking resource hogs" and move to the Armin method.

If you can price me a working Core i5 quad machine, 4gb of ram, Radeon 4850 512mb, 1TB 7200RPM for $600 that's silent in operation and comes with Windows7 Ultimate, let me know and I'll gladly concede the "mac tax" argument, even if the user experience is much lower on the Windows side of the fence.

[armin]

I was going to say lightroom but bridge seems more like the equivalent. To be honest, I don't use either since I don't need to batch thousands of photos, and bridge is painful on any computer. However, you're talking one piece of software over another. That just comes down to personal flavour. My friend has a killer powerbook with final cut pro, but he prefers his editing with Avid.

To each their own. I learned vectorwork with Freehand on a G3 and it took me forever to give it up to Illustrator. Same thing with why diehard old designers stick to mac. Cause it had an advantage over PC's way back but is now irrelevant.

Lol, an entry level iMac is $1300. For that price I could run a quad core I7. The only advantage the imac would have is the monitor.

You got a good deal off the warranty-eventually, so I guess that's all that matters.

[Gord Lacey]

Back to the topic at hand (and not the "PCs are better" posts that armin seems to be making)...

You may want to look into "ProCare" next time you take a computer in to the Apple store. This is basically a "put me first" service that costs $99 (it has some other benefits, but that's the main one). I had to take my laptop in a couple of times for various things and both times I picked it up a couple of hours later (1 hour when they replaced the DVD drive, and 4 hours when they replaced the screen and graphics/logic board). Well worth the money because I depend on my laptop like you depend on your iMac. AppleCare is a great thing, and I'll likely buy it for every other Mac I buy in the future.

One thing I dislike about the Apple Store is the lack of a defined "PAY HERE" area. I've stood at the back of the store for 5+ mins waiting for someone to take my money; it's annoying when you can't give a company money. I've always found the people working there to be knowledgeable and easy to deal with, and Geniuses are great to deal with (had a dumb one in LA to compare the West Ed ones to).

Gord

[noodle]

Thanks for the tip Gord. I decided to do some "stress testing" this weekend to see how well the machine works. Ended up gaming..err..testing the weekend away!

[Legacy]

Hey Noodle/Gord,
I'm heading to Santa Clara for some EMC Training next week.. seeing that Cupertino & Infinite Loop is right around the corner, is there any fancy Apple logowear that you'd like?

PM me if you're interested.