Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius Read online

  None of us could find a simple, clear way to explain it to this customer, and even if someone had, he wouldn’t have believed it.

  “I’ve got a virus,” he insisted, pointing to some cryptic process name in Activity Monitor that he didn’t understand.

  “No, you don’t,” I replied, trying my best to explain to him what the process actually did. “There are no known viruses for Mac OS X,” I continued. “I’ll give you my next pay check if I can’t find what these processes are in Apple’s Knowledge Base.”

  That didn’t go over very well. He asked to speak to my manager.

  “I run the Bar,” I snapped. “No one here knows better than I do.”

  I knew I sounded arrogant, but I didn’t care. Involving management would just create more headaches, and clearly this customer just didn’t get it.

  “I’d like to talk to the store manager now.”

  “Fine,” I said, and left to go get him. I explained to my manager what was going on, and that the customer refused to listen to me.

  Since I left out the bit about my smartass remark, my manager backed me up to the customer, who left frustrated, “infected” PowerBook in hand.

  Shattered (iPhones and Customers)

  One morning, a girl named Meghan came in wearing a sorority jacket and a low-cut top. She was quite attractive.

  She had shattered her iPhone 3G. I mean, shattered: the thing looked like it had been thrown out of a moving car. The LCD behind the glass didn’t even light up.

  Meghan understood that there was a fee associated with swapping a smashed iPhone. As I worked on her paperwork, we chatted about the local college she attended, and what she was studying.

  I wasn’t super impressed with her conversational skills, but I didn’t mind too much.

  I wrapped up the transaction, and as she gathered her purse and papers, I moved on to my next appointment. As Meghan got off the stool and turned away from the Genius Bar , I heard the unmistakable thud of plastic and glass on expensive hardwood.

  And cursing. Oh my, her cursing was as exquisite as she was.

  She had dropped her newly-purchased replacement phone right there in front of the Genius Bar, breaking the screen.

  It was all I could do not to make a comment about irony. She turned around, looking at me like she wanted to cry.

  I replaced the second phone for free. Charging someone for a replacement phone twice in a matter of minutes seemed wrong.

  Besides, she was super hot.

  It’s shallow, and terrible and sexist, but attractive girls usually got lots of attention at the Genius Bar. Some of the nerds hadn’t been around girls that often, I guess.

  Granted, I had one team member who routinely gave out his cell number on the back of his card — and routinely got calls from customers.

  Meghan wasn’t the only one who came to the Bar with a destroyed device. One evening, a guy named James came in on crutches. Turns out that James’ car had been hit by a tractor-trailer six weeks earlier, totaling the car and severely injuring him and his passenger.

  The accident also totaled James’ 12-inch PowerBook. This thing was destroyed. The case was warped; the lid was shaped like a banana. The screen was obliterated, and God only knows where the battery ended up.

  It turns out that James was a cool guy, despite his misfortune. I knew this for two reasons:

  First of all, he had a full backup of his data, so the fact that his PowerBook had been crunched wasn’t compounded by a heart-breaking tale of data loss.

  Secondly, he brought in the PowerBook — with an appointment — solely to show it off. He didn’t even want to know how much it would have cost to rebuild it — he just thought the Genius staff would think it was cool.

  He was right.

  After letting us take photos of his destroyed old notebook, he bought a loaded MacBook Pro. He said he was going to put the PowerBook in a case in his house as a reminder of how close he had come to death.

  Pretty cool.

  Filled

  During the school day, I saw a lot of parents come in to the Genius Bar to get their iPods, iPhones and Macs fixed without kids in tow.

  One Tuesday morning, I was working the Bar. It was quiet in the store, which was a rare thing.

  A woman in her late twenties came in with a 14-inch iBook, saying its optical drive wouldn’t accept CDs.

  Now, I was never a fan of the 14-inch iBook. It had the same screen resolution as the much lighter, much more portable 12-inch model. Besides that, every one I ever saw come in to the Bar looked gross.

  “I’m sure my kids had something to do with this,” she said. “They aren’t supposed to mess with my laptop, but they do anyways.”

  As this was before I was a parent, I gave her kids the benefit of the doubt.

  “Let us hold on to it today, and we’ll pop the case open and see if everything’s okay.”

  It was the last time I gave any kid the benefit of the doubt.

  Upon opening the machine I pulled the following items out of the optical drive:

  * Half a CD

  * Blockbuster membership card

  * What appeared to be some old lettuce

  * A photo of the customer and her little boy

  I called the owner of the iBook. “Hey, it’s Stephen from the Apple Store,” I said. “I have some news about your iBook.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well,” I continued, “your CD drive works just fine now, but it was definitely your kids’ doing.”

  That iBook wasn’t the only computer I came across filled with something, however.

  Cats love laptops. They’re warm, and if the fans are on fast enough, they sort of hum. The disgusting side effect of this, however, is that many cat owners’ laptops are chock full of fur.

  There is usually little warning before opening a computer that it will be stuffed with cat hair. Thankfully, the Genius room was equipped with an anti-static vacuum cleaner that would make quick work of most furry buildups.

  The worst “filled” Mac was a PowerMac G4. The machine had been checked in for some software issues, and as was standard procedure with towers in for repair — especially the easy-to-open G4 — a Genius opened the side of it just to make sure everything looked okay.

  I almost lost my lunch when I was called in to see it.

  It was the Roach Apocalypse.

  The case was packed to the handles with dead roaches and other bugs. They may be able to survive a thermonuclear war, but apparently they’re no match for the inside of a G4 tower.

  I definitely lost my confidence in the future of the humanity that day. If this computer’s owner was any indication of how natural selection has been working so far, we’re doomed.

  We called the customer, telling him what we’d found. “We’re going to leave it out back behind the store if you aren’t here to pick it up today,” the Genius on the phone said. “We’re not keeping this thing overnight.”

  Of course, we had no authority to tell the customer that. If anyone had tried it, they’d have been fired for sure. But it sure made a good threat. The customer came in a few hours later to pick up his Mac. For some reason, he didn’t say anything about his reason for picking it up before the repair was complete.

  Surprise and Delight

  I can’t speak to the current policy, but while I worked there, Apple allowed Geniuses to replace customers’ computers with new ones after a certain number of “major hardware failures.”

  As previously discussed, no machine could ruin a Genius’s day the way a PowerMac G5 could.

  One morning, a customer came in with a quad-core PowerMac G5 that would power on, but not boot. The screen would stay black and the fans would rev up, spinning as fast as they would go.

  I knew before I powered up the machine in to check the Diagnostic LEDs on the logic board that this was going to be a hardware issue.

  The customer was a professional audio engineer, and this Mac was the heart of his studio. Without it,
he wasn’t working. He was concerned about an upcoming deadline he needed to meet for a client. I stressed to him that while sometimes repairs on the PowerMac G5 could be tricky, we would do everything we could to get him back up and running as soon as possible.

  As was my custom — despite policies against it and the complaints of our inventory guy — I ordered new processors, a new power supply and a new logic board, wanting to cover my bases. I knew I’d probably need at least two of those things.

  I was off the day the machine was up for repair, but the Genius who was behind the screwdrivers was well-versed in the black art of G5 repair. After several hours, he concluded that the replacement logic board we had been sent was dead on arrival, and ordered another one. He called the customer with an update, and carried on with his day.

  When the second logic board came in, I was on duty for repairs, so I was able to put it in the machine, joining it with the new set of processors and the new power supply. I got the whole thing together — no simple task — and powered it up.

  Nothing. Nada. Zip. Only the familiar whine of the maxed-out fans.

  What the heck, I thought, and took the machine back apart to try a spare power supply we had lying around.

  An hour later, I plugged it in again. Same problem. I couldn’t decide whether to throw the machine across the room or call a priest.

  As a last-ditch effort, I ordered another new logic board, another new pair of processors and yet another power supply. I hoped that by replacing all three at once would I be able to getting the machine working again. I didn’t have any hard proof that this would be the case. Really, I didn’t even care about troubleshooting the machine any more. I just wanted it out of the store.

  By this point, the customer was getting antsy about his repair. I ensured him that we would get it resolved, even though I was beginning to doubt my “replace everything” tactic.

  As I feared, after having every single one of its major components replaced with a known-good part, the machine still refused to power on correctly. After talking it over with my manager, I called the customer with what I figured was good news: we were going to upgrade him to a Mac Pro.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “But I can’t run Leopard.”

  It turned out that switching to an Intel machine wasn’t going to be a problem, but the operating system was. At the time, current Mac Pros required OS X 10.5. For his studio gear to work, he had to run OS X 10.4, Tiger.

  Much to the chagrin of its nerdier users, Apple always ships new hardware with the most up-to-date version of OS X. No versions of OS X prior to the one installed at the factory will run.

  The first generation of quad-core Mac Pros came with 10.4.9, which would have resolved everyone’s problems. However, since they had been refreshed weeks earlier, I no longer had one in stock at the store to swap.

  I told the customer I would look in to it, and hung up.

  I then called AppleCare, and asked to speak to an internal customer service representative. I told her my situation, and asked the question that had just crossed my mind.

  “Can you ship me one from the Refurbished Online Store?”

  It turned out that even though no one had ever done it before, it was possible. 48 hours later, my customer came in to pick up his “new” machine.

  While replacing this machine was only a little out of the ordinary, getting a machine shipped from “corporate” Apple — that is, outside normal retail channels — was rare. It’s an example of what Apple calls “surprise and delight” — a phrase coined to describe situations where Apple employees bend the rules for the good of the customer.

  After thanking me for an uncomfortable amount of time, he said something I won’t forget for as long as I work in IT. “Thank you for letting me get back to what I love doing.”

  A few months later, he came by the store to give me a copy of the first album he produced on his new machine. It was fantastic, and it really made my day. It was nice to win one.

  July 11, 2008

  July 11, 2008 was the day I knew I was going to quit my job at the Apple store.

  That was the day that Apple released the iPhone 3G, iOS 2.0, the iOS App Store, and MobileMe, all at once.

  The launch of a single one of those would have meant a chaotic day at the Genius Bar. Having all of them come out within hours of each other was insanity. Apple’s secrecy helps keep the company ahead of its competition, but that secrecy sometimes hurts its retail employees, down on the front lines.

  Apple would often withhold troubleshooting steps and documentation until a product or service was public. As Apple users are always anxious to try the newest thing, we often saw customers at the Bar with something new before we’d had time to learn about it.

  Sadly, July 11 didn’t go as smoothly as the company would have liked.

  The iPhone 3G was met with an even larger number of early adopters than the original model. The line of customers was longer and the hype was bigger now that the original had been out for a year. People had seen what the iPhone could do, and they were excited to get their hands on the new model.

  The Genius Bar was supposed to be closed during the iPhone 3G launch, but people kept calling and showing up anyway, most of them having issues upgrading their iPhone software. Some people had managed to update their devices before iTunes collapsed under the load of all of the updates and activations.

  With the iPhone 3G, Apple required in-store activation for the first time. While the first few customers’ phones were quickly activated and the happy customers sent on their way, it wasn’t long before AT&T’s system went down because of the heavy load, leaving customers unable to activate the phones they’d just purchased. Because of the policy requiring in-store activations and restrictions built into iTunes to enforce that policy, we weren’t supposed let those customers leave the store with un-activated iPhones.

  This obviously caused issues, as we couldn’t let people in line into the Store, and couldn’t let people who’d purchased phones but couldn’t activate them leave. Since these issues were happening all over the US, getting any update from AT&T or the iTunes team was impossible.

  Eventually, Apple let people leave without activating their devices, letting them wait in the comfort of their homes for Apple to get its collective act together. That didn’t do much to appease people we’d kept waiting in the hot sun outside the store, though.

  Alongside the iPhone 3G, Apple released version 2.0 of the iPhone’s operating system. Since iTunes was getting hammered with 3G activations, users who attempted to update their original iPhones were getting stuck in limbo, as the 2.0 software required a re-activation with the iTunes Store to complete the process.

  Good times.

  While all of this was going on, MobileMe was also launching on July 11, 2008. It had an infamously rough start.

  MobileMe had a nasty habit of either doubling or deleting users’ information. With no access to the back-end of the service, Geniuses were helpless if the customer’s devices were configured correctly. .Mac users who were used to a stable service were rudely surprised when they picked up their updated iPhones to find that their contacts were gone.

  Steve Jobs later addressed just how badly things had gone, when he remarked the MobileMe launch “wasn’t Apple’s finest hour.”

  No kidding.

  In fact, at the iCloud announcement in 2011, Jobs himself made fun of it.

  For someone whose job it was to solve technical issues, this was all unbelievably frustrating. I couldn’t fix a single thing, I was getting very little information from Apple or AT&T, and I had a mob of upset customers stuck in the store. To make matters worse, my manager couldn’t understand why we couldn’t get things up and running again.

  (He wasn’t the technical kind. Apple had brought him in from another Apple store, but before that, he ran a Gap. Really.)

  I felt truly helpless. I couldn’t help my team, my store, or my customers. My wife had to talk me out of walking out the
door via text messages.

  Apple learned a hard lesson about product launches on July 11, 2008.

  These days, iOS updates aren’t released on the same day as new hardware, in order to give iTunes and the carriers less strain on their servers and customer support systems.

  Likewise, iCloud seems much more robust than MobileMe, and users have seen far fewer sync issues with the new service. Apple is still ambitious about launching new things, but now, they’re a little smarter about it.

  Lessons Learned

  The iPhone changed Apple forever. More than even the iPod, the iPhone transitioned Apple from being a computer company to being a consumer electronics company. The iPad is continuing that trend.

  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world thanks to such devices.

  In high school, I was introduced to the original iMac and it changed my life. I fell in love with the green translucent machine and the software it ran. The hardware and software both impacted me in a way that I couldn’t shake.

  When I started journalism school in 2004, I studied art and journalism, working with Macs day in and day out for years in class and putting together the college newspaper.

  When I took a sales position at the Apple store, I knew I wanted to become a Genius so I could learn more about the machines that had captured my attention. Like many nerds before me, I was swept off my feet by the company and by its products.

  But, as sometimes happens in romantic relationships, my heart was broken.

  As I wrote in the last chapter, the iPhone 3G was the last straw for me. I went to work to learn about and repair computers, not swap smartphones.

  iPhones are easy to troubleshoot: if the issue exists after a software restore, then the problem is almost always hardware-related. Nowadays, Geniuses can replace certain parts of the iPhone, but for years the only solution for a hardware problem was a simple swap, giving the customer a refurbished device and putting the faulty one in a box.

  I relished the challenge a sick Macintosh presented me, and started to miss that thrill of problem-solving when the iPhone began to take over the Genius Bar. I love puzzles, and nothing is as satisfying as solving one for a customer who is depending on you to get it right.