sweet. glad to hear it. I have a bit of an edge here... I troubleshoot Macs for a living.
He told us he had the RAM fully seated so we took him at is word!!
Glad all is well Andy. When I got my MAC the door for the SuperDrive would not open so when I called Apple tech the kid said " Yeah, they do that sometime - just unlatch the latches inside the case and then relatch them." and he was right - fixed it just fine.
Enjoy your new MAC - you're gonna love it - I know it for sure!
He told us he had the RAM fully seated so we took him at is word!!
Glad all is well Andy. When I got my MAC the door for the SuperDrive would not open so when I called Apple tech the kid said " Yeah, they do that sometime - just unlatch the latches inside the case and then relatch them." and he was right - fixed it just fine.
Enjoy your new MAC - you're gonna love it - I know it for sure!
i couldn't figger out the door, had to rtfm and then saw that there's a key for it on the keyboard
ahhhh...thanks for the opportunity for me to be a 55 year old woman from Equatorial Guinea, whom is an architect in an energy utilities & earns $90K/year andy.
Even for a moment i dont think i will find anything in my day today that will make me wonder about a mudbrick roof line quite so much.
ahhhh...thanks for the opportunity for me to be a 55 year old woman from Equatorial Guinea, whom is an architect in an energy utilities & earns $90K/year andy.
Even for a moment i dont think i will find anything in my day today that will make me wonder about a mudbrick roof line quite so much.
:: w h o o s h :: (sound of your post going over my head )
Cant see the post...had to fill out online question form.
fixed:
They're Off to See the Wizards
By KATIE HAFNER
SAN FRANCISCO
IT was just past noon on a recent weekday at the Apple Store here, and the Genius Bar was buzzing.
At one end of the 40-foot maple counter, a cherub-faced Genius in a black T-shirt spoke soothingly to a middle-aged customer whose iPod kept erasing songs. After a few minutes of probing, the Genius announced his diagnosis: the firmware needed updating. Then he showed the man how to do it.
At the other end of the bar, another amiable Genius - Apple's term for its in-store technical support staff - greeted a couple who had arrived with an ailing PowerBook. "Hey, what's going on?" he said, and got down to work.
In an age when human help of any kind is hard to come by, the eight or nine Geniuses on duty at any given time here are a welcome anomaly.
In fact, go to any of the 102 Apple-owned retail stores in the world and - if you are willing to wait - you will be treated to what is an increasingly rare service: free face-to-face technical support.
The walk-up assistance has existed since the first Apple Store opened in 2001, in Washington. Over the years, as the concept gained momentum, the bars have become what Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice president for retailing, calls the soul of the stores.
"It's the part of the store that people connect to emotionally more than any other," Mr. Johnson said.
For the first few years, there was general mayhem around the Genius Bars. Customers would stand four or five deep, broken gadgets in hand, waiting to speak to an expert. Now there is an online system for scheduling free, same-day appointments. And for $100 a year, customers can schedule appointments up to a week in advance with the expert of their choice.
But there can still be long waits. Just after Christmas, for instance, at the Apple Store in SoHo in New York, by 10 a.m. the earliest appointment that could be had was at 4 p.m. People left and came back, or sat for hours, reading, talking on their cellphones or milling about the store.
The San Francisco store, like all the others, has instituted a pager system for those who show up when all the experts are busy, like the man on this day who lugged his iMac to the bar, hoisted over his shoulder like a recalcitrant child. He took a pager and joined a dozen or so others waiting for help.
The concept of a bar came to Mr. Johnson one night when he was thinking about the kind of environment Apple wanted to create in its stores. He said he was inspired by Four Seasons, the Ritz-Carlton and other hotels where service is paramount.
"We believed you had to bring the people dimension back into retail," said Mr. Johnson, who joined Apple five years ago after 15 years at Target. "We thought, What about giving tech support that's as welcoming as the bar at the Ritz?"
Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a high-tech consulting firm in Campbell, Calif., said Apple's strategy was sound. "It's all part of a sales process," he said. "They have these guys who are extremely articulate answering customers' questions, which is key not only to the sales process, but the support afterwards."
Other computer retail stores have technical support counters, too. A few, like CompUSA and Best Buy, even have traveling teams of tech support staff who make house calls. But those services are not free.
Further, Mr. Bajarin said, the wider spectrum of problems encountered at other stores dilutes the quality of service.
"A Best Buy could be handling not just H-P, but Gateway and Epson and whatever else they have in the store," he said. "These guys running the Genius Bars are extremely well trained around a single platform."
Hiring those Geniuses - the label was Mr. Johnson's idea, too - is not difficult. He said that when the company advertises for an opening, an average of 50 people apply within 24 hours. For the most part, the applicants already have extensive technical knowledge. Apple provides eight weeks of training, four weeks at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and another four weeks at the store.
Mr. Johnson said an initial concern was that the people hired would be geeky, lacking the social skills for a job that calls for continuous interaction with strangers. But he soon found that more often than not, the employees were well-socialized young people who happened to know a lot about computers.
Each employee has an area of expertise - digital photography, say, or the Windows operating system. And they aren't too proud to call on colleagues for help.
"I borrow others' brain cells all the time," said Diana Souverbielle, an employee in the San Francisco store, who confessed to knowing "just enough about Windows to get in trouble."
David Marcantonio, 25, who diagnosed the firmware problem, is the resident iPod expert at the San Francisco store. Mr. Marcantonio, who studied criminology in college and has been fluent in most things Apple since age 14, stands out from his co-workers because his T-shirt reads iPod Genius.
"It's a bull's-eye," Mr. Marcantonio said of the shirt. Half of the customers at the Genius Bar these days have iPod-related problems.
Sometimes the public misunderstands the purpose of the Genius Bar, mistaking it for a think tank or an intellectual sounding board. David Isom, 29, who decided to defer a legal career in favor of a stint at the bar, said a man came in recently to discuss an idea he had for a solar-powered subway system. "He had technical questions, and he wanted to pitch it to us," Mr. Isom said. "I know nothing about solar power."
Indeed, they are humble experts. When confronted by a thorny problem on the fringe of their expertise, they might conduct a Google search to consult sources that are "not necessarily endorsed by Apple," Mr. Isom said.
And the experience of one customer whose keyboard had a sticky "e," which was cured by Ms. Souverbielle's mere touch, suggests that the experts might even have healing powers. Ms. Souverbielle declared that it was merely a coincidence.
Invariably in their 20's and 30's, and predominantly male, Apple's experts do keep lofty company. Behind each bar is a screen with a rotating display of quotations from half a dozen better-known intellectual luminaries, like Leonardo da Vinci ("The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding") and Michelangelo ("If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all").
But could Michelangelo have executed a clean startup from an external drive on a PowerBook G4?
Could Leonardo have restored the video on Joe Montana's iBook?
That task was performed by Chris Tichenor, a 24-year-old Genius in San Francisco. No matter that the concierge mistakenly entered Mr. Montana, the famous quarterback, into the appointment queue as Steve Young, Mr. Montana's successor on the San Francisco 49ers. "He didn't seem to mind," Mr. Tichenor said.
By Mr. Johnson's estimate, each of the company's 500 experts handles some 200 customers a week, taking as long as is needed to solve each problem.
The stores in general and the Genius Bars in particular have been credited with creating a halo effect for Apple. The iPod owners who own PC's and go to the unrelentingly chic stores for an expert's help are often seduced by Apple's self-conscious hipness.
Paula Mauro, who lives in New York and recently spent several hours at the Genius Bar in the SoHo store, got that message when getting help with iPod-to-PC communication. As she sat at the bar with her 10-year-old son, William, who aspires to Macintosh ownership, it became evident to her that synching an iPod to a Macintosh computer is relatively seamless, while her three-year-old PC posed no end of technical challenges.
"The next computer I buy is going to be a Mac," she said.
The Geniuses are patient even when people show up with problems that only a technophobe could create. Mr. Isom said people have come to him with an iPod that they insisted was dead - until Mr. Isom showed them that they had pushed the Hold switch, which inactivates the iPod's buttons, mainly so that it cannot be turned on or off inadvertently.
If a problem can be solved on the spot, the Genius may disappear into the back and re-emerge with a piece of equipment restored to health. Broken iPods are often replaced at no cost, Mr. Marcantonio said, because if the warranty applies, the easiest thing to do is to hand the customer a new one.
In some ways, this has little to do with keen technical knowledge and a lot to do with astute customer service.
The experience of Cecilia Joyce, a marathon runner who claims to be unable to live without her iPod, is a recent case in point. Ms. Joyce's iPod is packed with music like Boy George's rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema," which inspires her to run longer, sometimes even faster.
When her iPod's battery stopped holding a charge, Ms. Joyce went straight to the Genius Bar in San Francisco. She apologized to Mr. Marcantonio for having bought the device at a different Apple Store. Unfazed by this mundane detail, and without further ado, he gave Ms. Joyce a new iPod.
Were it not for the Genius Bar, Ms. Joyce might have gone an untenable two weeks without a device, the amount of time it could have taken to send it to be repaired or replaced.
Soon after the elated Ms. Joyce left, Mr. Marcantonio glanced down at his computer to see what troubled device was coming next. "Oh, it's an iPod Shuffle - this is going to be interesting," he said, delighted by his first encounter with the tiny new flash-based iPod.
Mr. Marcantonio picked up the white plastic stick and gave its miniature controls a quick poke.
Unlike the clerk in the Monty Python dead parrot skit, who refuses to concede that the bird he sold to a customer was in fact deceased, Mr. Marcantonio knows a dead iPod Shuffle when he sees one. The solution: give the customer a new one.
Apple vs IBM
Well I must say that I'm a Software Developer on the IBM side of the world and for business applications it cannot be beat.
HOWEVER!!!!!, and there's always a however.
:lynn
I must stick my tail between my legs and admit that the Apple rivals the IBM in just about ALL graphic situations. Now to be honest I have very little experience with any apple equipment but I have friends that are Graphics Artists and they'll choose an Apple over IBM for that kind of work.
Will getting the 17" Powerbook G4 with 2GB of RAM be sufficient or is it a waste of money and I should wait for something else?
sufficient for what? photoshop? well sure, for traveling and field work, i run photoshop on a 15" pb g4, 1.5gb ram and with 1.67mhz proc, and 80gig 5400 hd. it's fast enough...
but when you say sufficient, you're not comparing it to anything, nor are you saying what you have now, or what your performance desires are... so, tell us more lucky and we can help
Well I use PhotoShop and a few other photo programs, it seems each one does one thing great but not all things great. I heard iPhoto did all things great.
Well let's see. I would use it for photos 99% of the time. I need to burn DVDs, run photoshop and edit 3-4 images at once, print to a plotter, and catalog images. That's about it. I am debating getting only 1GB of RAM since it cuts $500 off.
Well I use PhotoShop and a few other photo programs, it seems each one does one thing great but not all things great. I heard iPhoto did all things great.
Well let's see. I would use it for photos 99% of the time. I need to burn DVDs, run photoshop and edit 3-4 images at once, print to a plotter, and catalog images. That's about it. I am debating getting only 1GB of RAM since it cuts $500 off.
you should be fine. load up the ram, though. buy it from crucial.com and save approx half or more over apple's price. and it takes all of 30 seconds to plug in the sodimms.
you should be fine. load up the ram, though. buy it from crucial.com and save approx half or more over apple's price. and it takes all of 30 seconds to plug in the sodimms.
i believe, sid, someone once said something about "great minds think alike"
My sister used to say "jinx you owe me a coke" and then she'd start counting how many Cokes I owed her until one day I dropped a case of beer on her head and now she has trouble speaking, let alone counting.
I think it is faster in a laptop. One cover comes off and there is the slot. In my desktop you have to remove the entire case, move wires, maybe move a drive or a card...it can be a mess.
Comments
He told us he had the RAM fully seated so we took him at is word!!
Glad all is well Andy. When I got my MAC the door for the SuperDrive would not open so when I called Apple tech the kid said " Yeah, they do that sometime - just unlatch the latches inside the case and then relatch them." and he was right - fixed it just fine.
Enjoy your new MAC - you're gonna love it - I know it for sure!
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
i couldn't figger out the door, had to rtfm and then saw that there's a key for it on the keyboard
thanks pf
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
No problem boss - Just glad you're up and running. Looking forward to your new leap in productivity
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23366
Dave
http://www.lifekapptured.com (gallery)
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
done, dave.. thanks very much for the reminder.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Way to go, Andy. Already using the proper lingo. Upgrading, not switching. Right on.
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/technology/circuits/27appl.html?oref=login
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Even for a moment i dont think i will find anything in my day today that will make me wonder about a mudbrick roof line quite so much.
:: w h o o s h :: (sound of your post going over my head
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
fixed:
They're Off to See the Wizards
By KATIE HAFNER
SAN FRANCISCO
IT was just past noon on a recent weekday at the Apple Store here, and the Genius Bar was buzzing.
At one end of the 40-foot maple counter, a cherub-faced Genius in a black T-shirt spoke soothingly to a middle-aged customer whose iPod kept erasing songs. After a few minutes of probing, the Genius announced his diagnosis: the firmware needed updating. Then he showed the man how to do it.
At the other end of the bar, another amiable Genius - Apple's term for its in-store technical support staff - greeted a couple who had arrived with an ailing PowerBook. "Hey, what's going on?" he said, and got down to work.
In an age when human help of any kind is hard to come by, the eight or nine Geniuses on duty at any given time here are a welcome anomaly.
In fact, go to any of the 102 Apple-owned retail stores in the world and - if you are willing to wait - you will be treated to what is an increasingly rare service: free face-to-face technical support.
The walk-up assistance has existed since the first Apple Store opened in 2001, in Washington. Over the years, as the concept gained momentum, the bars have become what Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice president for retailing, calls the soul of the stores.
"It's the part of the store that people connect to emotionally more than any other," Mr. Johnson said.
For the first few years, there was general mayhem around the Genius Bars. Customers would stand four or five deep, broken gadgets in hand, waiting to speak to an expert. Now there is an online system for scheduling free, same-day appointments. And for $100 a year, customers can schedule appointments up to a week in advance with the expert of their choice.
But there can still be long waits. Just after Christmas, for instance, at the Apple Store in SoHo in New York, by 10 a.m. the earliest appointment that could be had was at 4 p.m. People left and came back, or sat for hours, reading, talking on their cellphones or milling about the store.
The San Francisco store, like all the others, has instituted a pager system for those who show up when all the experts are busy, like the man on this day who lugged his iMac to the bar, hoisted over his shoulder like a recalcitrant child. He took a pager and joined a dozen or so others waiting for help.
The concept of a bar came to Mr. Johnson one night when he was thinking about the kind of environment Apple wanted to create in its stores. He said he was inspired by Four Seasons, the Ritz-Carlton and other hotels where service is paramount.
"We believed you had to bring the people dimension back into retail," said Mr. Johnson, who joined Apple five years ago after 15 years at Target. "We thought, What about giving tech support that's as welcoming as the bar at the Ritz?"
Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a high-tech consulting firm in Campbell, Calif., said Apple's strategy was sound. "It's all part of a sales process," he said. "They have these guys who are extremely articulate answering customers' questions, which is key not only to the sales process, but the support afterwards."
Other computer retail stores have technical support counters, too. A few, like CompUSA and Best Buy, even have traveling teams of tech support staff who make house calls. But those services are not free.
Further, Mr. Bajarin said, the wider spectrum of problems encountered at other stores dilutes the quality of service.
"A Best Buy could be handling not just H-P, but Gateway and Epson and whatever else they have in the store," he said. "These guys running the Genius Bars are extremely well trained around a single platform."
Hiring those Geniuses - the label was Mr. Johnson's idea, too - is not difficult. He said that when the company advertises for an opening, an average of 50 people apply within 24 hours. For the most part, the applicants already have extensive technical knowledge. Apple provides eight weeks of training, four weeks at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and another four weeks at the store.
Mr. Johnson said an initial concern was that the people hired would be geeky, lacking the social skills for a job that calls for continuous interaction with strangers. But he soon found that more often than not, the employees were well-socialized young people who happened to know a lot about computers.
Each employee has an area of expertise - digital photography, say, or the Windows operating system. And they aren't too proud to call on colleagues for help.
"I borrow others' brain cells all the time," said Diana Souverbielle, an employee in the San Francisco store, who confessed to knowing "just enough about Windows to get in trouble."
David Marcantonio, 25, who diagnosed the firmware problem, is the resident iPod expert at the San Francisco store. Mr. Marcantonio, who studied criminology in college and has been fluent in most things Apple since age 14, stands out from his co-workers because his T-shirt reads iPod Genius.
"It's a bull's-eye," Mr. Marcantonio said of the shirt. Half of the customers at the Genius Bar these days have iPod-related problems.
Sometimes the public misunderstands the purpose of the Genius Bar, mistaking it for a think tank or an intellectual sounding board. David Isom, 29, who decided to defer a legal career in favor of a stint at the bar, said a man came in recently to discuss an idea he had for a solar-powered subway system. "He had technical questions, and he wanted to pitch it to us," Mr. Isom said. "I know nothing about solar power."
Indeed, they are humble experts. When confronted by a thorny problem on the fringe of their expertise, they might conduct a Google search to consult sources that are "not necessarily endorsed by Apple," Mr. Isom said.
And the experience of one customer whose keyboard had a sticky "e," which was cured by Ms. Souverbielle's mere touch, suggests that the experts might even have healing powers. Ms. Souverbielle declared that it was merely a coincidence.
Invariably in their 20's and 30's, and predominantly male, Apple's experts do keep lofty company. Behind each bar is a screen with a rotating display of quotations from half a dozen better-known intellectual luminaries, like Leonardo da Vinci ("The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding") and Michelangelo ("If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all").
But could Michelangelo have executed a clean startup from an external drive on a PowerBook G4?
Could Leonardo have restored the video on Joe Montana's iBook?
That task was performed by Chris Tichenor, a 24-year-old Genius in San Francisco. No matter that the concierge mistakenly entered Mr. Montana, the famous quarterback, into the appointment queue as Steve Young, Mr. Montana's successor on the San Francisco 49ers. "He didn't seem to mind," Mr. Tichenor said.
By Mr. Johnson's estimate, each of the company's 500 experts handles some 200 customers a week, taking as long as is needed to solve each problem.
The stores in general and the Genius Bars in particular have been credited with creating a halo effect for Apple. The iPod owners who own PC's and go to the unrelentingly chic stores for an expert's help are often seduced by Apple's self-conscious hipness.
Paula Mauro, who lives in New York and recently spent several hours at the Genius Bar in the SoHo store, got that message when getting help with iPod-to-PC communication. As she sat at the bar with her 10-year-old son, William, who aspires to Macintosh ownership, it became evident to her that synching an iPod to a Macintosh computer is relatively seamless, while her three-year-old PC posed no end of technical challenges.
"The next computer I buy is going to be a Mac," she said.
The Geniuses are patient even when people show up with problems that only a technophobe could create. Mr. Isom said people have come to him with an iPod that they insisted was dead - until Mr. Isom showed them that they had pushed the Hold switch, which inactivates the iPod's buttons, mainly so that it cannot be turned on or off inadvertently.
If a problem can be solved on the spot, the Genius may disappear into the back and re-emerge with a piece of equipment restored to health. Broken iPods are often replaced at no cost, Mr. Marcantonio said, because if the warranty applies, the easiest thing to do is to hand the customer a new one.
In some ways, this has little to do with keen technical knowledge and a lot to do with astute customer service.
The experience of Cecilia Joyce, a marathon runner who claims to be unable to live without her iPod, is a recent case in point. Ms. Joyce's iPod is packed with music like Boy George's rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema," which inspires her to run longer, sometimes even faster.
When her iPod's battery stopped holding a charge, Ms. Joyce went straight to the Genius Bar in San Francisco. She apologized to Mr. Marcantonio for having bought the device at a different Apple Store. Unfazed by this mundane detail, and without further ado, he gave Ms. Joyce a new iPod.
Were it not for the Genius Bar, Ms. Joyce might have gone an untenable two weeks without a device, the amount of time it could have taken to send it to be repaired or replaced.
Soon after the elated Ms. Joyce left, Mr. Marcantonio glanced down at his computer to see what troubled device was coming next. "Oh, it's an iPod Shuffle - this is going to be interesting," he said, delighted by his first encounter with the tiny new flash-based iPod.
Mr. Marcantonio picked up the white plastic stick and gave its miniature controls a quick poke.
Unlike the clerk in the Monty Python dead parrot skit, who refuses to concede that the bird he sold to a customer was in fact deceased, Mr. Marcantonio knows a dead iPod Shuffle when he sees one. The solution: give the customer a new one.
Genius.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Well I must say that I'm a Software Developer on the IBM side of the world and for business applications it cannot be beat.
HOWEVER!!!!!, and there's always a however.
:lynn
I must stick my tail between my legs and admit that the Apple rivals the IBM in just about ALL graphic situations. Now to be honest I have very little experience with any apple equipment but I have friends that are Graphics Artists and they'll choose an Apple over IBM for that kind of work.
Just my 1.5 cents.
kc7dji
Will getting the 17" Powerbook G4 with 2GB of RAM be sufficient or is it a waste of money and I should wait for something else?
sufficient for what? photoshop? well sure, for traveling and field work, i run photoshop on a 15" pb g4, 1.5gb ram and with 1.67mhz proc, and 80gig 5400 hd. it's fast enough...
but when you say sufficient, you're not comparing it to anything, nor are you saying what you have now, or what your performance desires are... so, tell us more lucky and we can help
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
Well let's see. I would use it for photos 99% of the time. I need to burn DVDs, run photoshop and edit 3-4 images at once, print to a plotter, and catalog images. That's about it. I am debating getting only 1GB of RAM since it cuts $500 off.
i believe, sid, someone once said something about "great minds think alike"
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
you should be fine. load up the ram, though. buy it from crucial.com and save approx half or more over apple's price. and it takes all of 30 seconds to plug in the sodimms.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Oh, sorry, wrong topic.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
ok ok ok
maybe it takes two minutes. it takes a day, if you don't have a tiny phillips-head screwdriver, the kind you need to say, repair eyeglasses
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
You heard wrong. Great for beginners, fine for intermediates, a novelty for the advanced (order books, prints, maybe, but not as your main app).
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops