Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Introduction

  “I Didn’t Make it to the Bathroom”

  Obsolete Hardware and Obsolete Users

  The iPhone Launch

  You’re Just A Kid

  The iPhone That Wouldn’t Die

  So Much Porn

  The Smoking G5

  Nearly Tragic Data Loss

  “He’s Spying On Me”

  Shattered (iPhones and Customers)

  Filled

  Surprise and Delight

  July 11, 2008

  Lessons Learned

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Bartending:

  Memoirs of an Apple Genius

  by Stephen Hackett

  About the Author

  Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Stephen Hackett fell in love with both the Mac and journalism working on his high school’s student newspaper. After studying art and journalism at the University of Memphis, he went to work for Apple as a Mac Genius.

  Leading a young team of Geniuses through a period that saw the original iPhone launch and the release of MobileMe and the iOS App Store, Stephen saw first-hand Apple’s migration from computer company to consumer electronics giant.

  Now working in non-profit IT, Stephen works with a wide range of technologies. He’s married to his high school sweetheart and the father of two adorable kids. After they’re in bed, he writes about technology, journalism, and design on his weblog, 512pixels.net.

  Introduction

  When “Apple Store” shows up on your resumé people ask questions.

  Did you get free stuff?

  Did you know about products before they were announced?

  Did you ever get an email from Steve?

  Being one of the most successful companies in the world has made anything Apple-related newsworthy and special, including working in its retail stores. The truth is that selling computers at the Apple Store isn’t that much different from selling them anywhere else, but it is better.

  It’s better because Apple is different than most other companies. Despite its runaway success and growth the last few years, the company has managed not to lose its focus on providing excellent experiences for its customers.

  The Apple Store is the place where those experiences are made far better or far worse. Being on the front lines means gathering some great war stories. I’m here to share a few of mine.

  “I Didn’t Make it to the Bathroom”

  He came in with his mom, and neither of them looked happy. When they sat down at the Bar, I learned why.

  “This has liquid damage,” his mom said. “Tell them about it, John.”

  John started off his story as his mom sat a laptop bag down on the Genius Bar.

  “I was at a party the other weekend, and had a few too many beers,” he said, as his mom glared at him.

  “Anyways, I had to piss, and I was so hammered I didn’t make it to the bathroom.”

  Right then, I took my hands off of the white MacBook, which I had been removing from its neoprene sleeve.

  “It turns out I stumbled into a football player’s room … over to his desk … with his MacBook on it … and then I blacked out,” he stammered, as his mom tried to gauge my reaction to his underage’s son drunken adventures at some frat house.

  “Go on, tell him the rest of it,” the kid’s mom prodded him. She clearly wanted to maximize his embarrassment, and have him fill in the details.

  “I woke up to yelling,” he said. “The guy was seriously pissed off that I was in his room.”

  At this point, I was a little confused as to how this story ended up with John as a Genius Bar customer.

  Then, he finished his tale.

  “It turns out I had pissed on his desk and on his laptop. The guy chased me down the hall. I locked myself in the bathroom. He screamed and pounded on the door until campus police showed up.”

  I could hardly believe the guy’s story. It seemed like something from America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  “So, what’s it going to cost to fix this?” his mom said.

  “Well,” I said, shifting on my feet, “…with liquid damage, things are never cheap.” I told her what a Tier 4 repair cost.

  Upon hearing what was a rather large figure, the woman blew up, berating her son in front of staff and customers alike.

  “HOW COULD YOU BE SO IRRESPONSIBLE?” she yelled, as John just looked in to the distance. “THIS IS COMING OUT OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.”

  It didn’t seem like she was giving him much of a choice, so John opted to have the computer repaired.

  As a college student myself at the time, I was impressed that John had enough in the bank to cover a repair that cost almost $1,000.

  As we wrapped up the paperwork, I was torn between thinking John was an idiot and feeling sorry for the poor kid.

  I guess the moral of his story is that you should always check whether you’re peeing in a bathroom or on an open MacBook.

  Obsolete Hardware and Obsolete Users

  The two machines that helped save Apple — the iMac and the iBook — were initially powered by G3 processors. Blazingly fast when they were released, and the G3 powered every Mac made for a span of several years.

  Since I worked at the Apple Store from 2006 to 2008, I didn’t spend a lot of time working on G3-powered Macs. Many of them were already old when I started, but they did appear at the Bar from time to time.

  Apple has two ways it defines older Macs.

  Vintage machines are between five and seven years old. Stores and Apple-Authorized Service Providers outside of California have a hard time finding Apple-supplied parts for these machines.

  Obsolete Macs are older than seven years. Apple doesn’t supply any parts for repairing these computers. Granted, machines this old usually aren’t worth repairing, anyways.

  The company updates its “Vintage and Obsolete Hardware” list a few times a year.

  One such machine, a graphite-colored iBook G3, would pop up at the Bar fairly often. Its owner — an older guy named Paul — was an old-school Mac user, but not the cool kind.

  The cool kind of old-school Mac users usually had ponytails and 17-inch PowerBooks sporting rainbow Apple stickers. They embraced Apple’s future, while still celebrating its past.

  The uncool kind — like Paul — hated the idea that Apple products like OS 9, multi-colored iMacs and iBooks were disappearing in the face of Mac OS X and sleek aluminum Macs powered by Intel processors. They were determined to hold on to aging hardware and software as long as possible, and also determined to be as bitter as possible about the fact that time had passed them by.

  This particular day, Paul was upset that some web pages weren’t rendering correctly on his machine in Internet Explorer 5. IE 5 was released in January of 2000, so I was surprised that any sites loaded well in 2007, when my interaction with him took place.

  When I tried to explain that development for OS 9 applications had fizzled out in the eight years since OS X had been released, Paul refused to listen.

  “There’s no reason I should be considered a second-class citizen,” he fumed. “This iBook was expensive when I bought it.”

  The “I spent a lot of money with Apple” argument was used by customers at the Bar all the time, but rarely did it get them anywhere. It wasn’t that I didn’t respect the fact that they were loyal Apple customers. Everyone I saw had spent a lot of money with the company. It didn’t make anyone special as far as Mac Geniuses were concerned.

  Trying to avoid an argument, I simply said, “Let’s try iCab.” iCab was popular a
mong OS 9 diehards, as it was kept updated long after development of most other browsers for the older operating system had been abandoned.

  He left pacified, but I knew he was bound to be back with some other problem caused by his refusal to upgrade legacy software and hardware.

  Paul the iBook user wasn’t the only customer to bring aging hardware to the Genius Bar.

  Shirley was a customer with an eMac G4. The eMac wasn’t as old as the Clamshell iBook, but it was by no means a speed demon. She brought it in complaining about how slow it was, especially when opening Word documents.

  After poking around on the machine for a few minutes, I agreed with her.

  “Here’s the main problem,” I said. “You’ve only got 128 MB of RAM in this machine.” She was running Panther, and 128 MB was the absolute minimum requirement for the OS.

  When I told her that my staff could upgrade her machine, she stopped me. “I have a nephew who is good at this kind of thing. He can do it for me.”

  I said okay, gave her information about what type of memory she needed, and printed Apple’s do-it-yourself upgrade instructions.

  A week later, Shirley had another appointment. Seeing her name in the queue that morning, I made sure I was the one to help her this time, as her notes indicated there was an issue with the eMac I had just seen.

  “It won’t come on,” she complained. “Are you sure you gave me info on the right RAM?”

  Confident I hadn’t screwed up, I tipped the 50-pound machine over and unscrewed the plate on the bottom, to check that her nephew had installed the RAM correctly.

  He hadn’t. He’d installed it as well as the Hindenburg had been fire-proofed.

  While removing the old memory, he had not unclipped the RAM stick first, so when he pulled it out, he had pulled the memory connector completely off the logic board. The machine was toast — it needed a new logic board, and since it was damaged, it was going to be expensive.

  My customer was less than thrilled. “I’ll be talking to his father today about this!” she exclaimed, referring to her “computer-savvy” nephew.

  “Now, can you help me carry this out to my car?”

  I did, secretly hoping I’d run in to her nephew so I could tell him how much of an idiot he was.

  The iPhone Launch

  Without a doubt, the iPhone was one of the most important product launches for Apple in the company’s history. I am proud of the fact that I worked launch night, seeing the first iPhones go out the door in my area of the country.

  From the minute it was announced in January 2007, almost every interaction at the Genius Bar included questions about the iPhone. We didn’t have any information on it beyond what was on the company’s website and in Steve’s keynote, but nonetheless we tried to answer questions the best we could.

  People were curious, and for good reason. The iPhone announcement at Macworld was covered in the press like few tech announcements had been. There was an excitement about the iPhone that few products had ever enjoyed before.

  It was a long six months until the June release.

  The day of the launch — which was scheduled for 6 PM — we closed the store early.

  After covering the windows and doors with thick black fabric, we all went to work completely resetting the store for the iPhone.

  Normally at the Apple Store, issues like product placement, graphic panels, cabling, and window displays are handled by a small group of people referred to as the “Visual Team,” but for the iPhone, it was all hands on deck.

  Literally every single graphic panel in the store was changed to iPhone-related artwork. iPod accessories and Mac software were moved to make room for iPhone cases and cables. The whole front section of the store was rearranged to hold demo models. It was an all-out facelift.

  The first iPhone I got to see was tethered to a desk, but it was fully functioning. It was amazing. It was beautiful. I was blown away by how magical the thing felt. The multi-touch was super fast and smooth, and things like Visual Voicemail seemed to be from the future.

  I called my wife from it, just to tell her I was using one. I don’t think she was very impressed. Oh, well.

  We received very quick training on the core functions. Remember, this was long before the App Store, so the iPhone just had a few Apple-built apps on it.

  Geniuses got a little extra training about the hardware, but not much. Launch night was all about sales.

  At 6 PM, we uncovered the windows to the store. The huge crowd (the line wrapped around the shopping center) began cheering and applauding, like a rock concert was about to start. To this day, I’ve never seen anything like it.

  For hours, people streamed in to the store to purchase their phones. Honestly, it was an assembly line, with very little in the way of the helpful, personalized service Apple Stores usually try to offer. People came in, made their way to the Bar, picked a model, paid, and were gone.

  After the initial rush of first-day buyers had come and gone, Apple was sold out of iPhones for a while, but we did start seeing them trickle in to the Genius Bar.

  As with all of its new products, Apple used the Genius Bar to collect stats on early iPhone failures. We pretty much replaced them for anything in the first few weeks. In the early days, we even replaced iPhones for broken glass, which was an odd change from Apple’s normal policy (which doesn’t cover accidentally-damaged phones), but I believe Apple was trying to get an understanding just how tough its phone was out in the real world.

  Outside of damaged phones, we saw a smattering of hardware issues, but nothing widespread or very common, which was impressive considering it was a brand new product.

  Eventually, the iPhone customer base grew from those initial adopters to people who had never even had a smartphone before the iPhone.

  Apple had succeeded in taking what was once considered a product category reserved for professionals and bringing it to the mainstream consumer.

  With this growth, the Genius program felt stress like never before. The iPhone brought non-Apple nerds to the Bar in numbers like never before. These customers weren’t used to how the Bar worked, and many “educational” moments took place with these new Apple fans.

  Initially, iPhone appointments took place in the queue, the set of appointments setup for iPod customers, but the growing customer base soon swelled well past what our Bar could handle, and before long, we were seeing iPhone customers coming in without appointments every day. These customers had to be fit in to an already-packed schedule, often leading to lines, long waits and skipped lunch breaks.

  One day, I even made the Mayor of Memphis wait for an appointment.

  This stress that this added to the Bar was palatable. Appointments ran late, Geniuses lost their cool and management couldn’t understand why we couldn’t keep up. Thankfully, the supply of appointments and demand from customers equalized, but not before I — and others — got burned out on the iPhone.

  You’re Just A Kid

  Apple stores tend to be staffed with young workers. As a general rule, those in full-time positions tend to be older. Being in my early 20’s and running a Bar where some of the other Geniuses were over twice my age was difficult at times. I had staff members who didn’t want to listen to or respect someone younger than them.

  Far more often, though, it was customers who had a problem with it.

  I can remember one evening when the issue came up. I was closing down by myself, and this guy was the last appointment of the evening. He came in on time, and plopped what used to be a 17-inch MacBook Pro on the Bar.

  “It won’t boot.”

  “No kidding,” I said under my breath.

  It looked like the machine had fallen, with the lid closed, on its hinge. The screen and body were buckled. The LCD was smashed, and several keys were missing. There was so much damage that the lid couldn’t even shut all the way.

  “Well,” I said, “Let’s address this damage first.”

  As I said this, I knew I was o
pening a can of worms with this guy.

  “It booted fine after it fell,” he said. “Besides, it just fell out of my bag on to carpet.”

  Now, that might have been true, if by “carpet” he meant to say “concrete” or “tile” or “a land-mine.”

  “That might be true, but I can’t overlook this damage…” I started to say.

  “MIGHT BE TRUE?” he bellowed — cutting me off — so loudly that the two customers remaining in the store turned around.

  AppleCare, of course, doesn’t cover physical or liquid damage to products. If a product has a failure due to damage, that failure is considered out of warranty. If a customer chooses to pay to have the damage repaired, the machine returns to its in-warranty status.

  (It’s easy to think of this like a car warranty. Toyota would cover a non-operational headlight, but not if you’d wrapped your Camry around a tree first. Complaining to Toyota about the headlight at that point is just silly.)

  “I’m just saying I need to address the fact that your MacBook Pro seems to have some damage,” I responded, as calmly as I could. “And I can’t repair your machine under warranty unless you pay for the damage first. I have a hard time believing this damage is completely unrelated to the failure.”

  “You’re just a kid. Let me talk to the support manager,” he shot back.

  “You already are,” I replied.

  He stormed out. I hope he bought a Dell the next day.

  Customers weren’t the only people who had issues with younger Geniuses.

  One day around lunchtime, I was at the Bar, trying to get the queue back on schedule after a hectic morning of late and long-running appointments. Then, a saleswoman named Elizabeth came up and asked me a question.

  Now, some staff members would just wait off to the side after making eye contact, giving the Genius time to finish whatever they were doing with a customer.

  Elizabeth didn’t do this, however. She had been at the Store for years without ever really improving as a salesperson. She had been at the store for years, somehow outlasting far better employees.

  “How much RAM is in an iTouch?” she asked, interrupting the customer whom I was helping.