So my work supplied Mac Book Pro died in it’s sleep the other week so it needed looking at. The problem with the aesthetics obsessed Apple is you can’t just send it off to be looked at, No. You have to take it in person to the Genius Bar within the cold, joyless, smug Apple Store. The nearest one being in Birmingham.
The Genius’, as you’d expect aren’t exactly Genius’ just the usual ‘follow-these-steps-if-it-doesn’t-work-we’ll-give-it-to-a-real-engineer-to-fix’ types you get in these sort of places, see PC World for similar thing. As a self confessed geek what gets me is the sheer arrogance of the ‘Genius’ thing – Stephen Hawking is a genius, the portly bloke who ‘tested’ my Mac was not – regardless of the T-Shirt he was wearing; “Not all Superheroes wear Capes“. You could feel the ‘smug’ emanating from that store.
Anyway, after ‘genius‘ tried all the stuff I’d already tried he had to pass it to an engineer to look at – these are kept locked up in a room away from the shop floor, presumably because they don’t fit Apple’s ‘look’. Two days later they phoned to tell me the motherboard was dead and wanted £730 to repair. Much to my displeasure my employers didn’t want to pay this or indeed, buy me a new Mac Book Pro. So I was given a budget and told to find another laptop.
I ended up getting a nice Acer laptop with pretty decent spec, but it came with Windows Vista – an operating system I’ve managed so far to completely avoid. Our in-house IT dept sorted ou me a copy of Windows 7 and I have to say I’m very impressed with it. To date I’ve not had it crash, not had to manually end a non-responding process or throw it against the wall once. While the keyboard doesn’t light up, the power is not a funky magnet power plug I still like it.
I can’t think of Apple without think of The Thick Of It.
“You take the piss out of Al Jolson again and I will remove your iPod from its tiny nano-sheath and push it up your cock. Then I’ll put some speakers up your arse and put it on to shuffle with my fucking fist. Then, every time I hear something that I don’t like – which will be every time that something comes on – I will skip to the next track by crushing your balls”