“I stopped by the mall the other day, mainly to pick up a pair of sneakers my wife had ordered. (That’s another story, shopping — even picking up things — for the wife. It rarely ends well.) Anyway in the mall, I passed an Apple Store,” M.B. Darden writes for Burbia. “It had recently been renovated, and I had never been there. (In fact, I’d never been in an Apple Store anywhere.)”
I went in. First, I’m not a techie or a remotely skilled computer user. I have no strong feelings about Apple. I went in without preconceptions. I went in really to avoid leaving the mall — it was freezing out & snowing & I was hoping (dreaming) that a few minutes later it would be a lot warmer and not snowing,” Darden writes.
Here’s what I think I learned or observed or concluded on my first trip to the Apple Store:
1. Michael Dell & Other Consumer PC-Makers: It’s Over. Apple Has Won
2. Apple “Geniuses” Are Chick Magnets
3. Apple Geniuses Are In Fact Geniuses
4. Bridging The Generation Gap May Be Possible, After All
5. Starbucks, Don’t Get Too Cocky
6. New Best Place To Furnish Your Home
7. Black (In fashion) Is Back
8. I’m A Lot Less Savvy And Smart Than I Thought
“I had gone to the mall to pick up my wife’s sneakers. I had no need for a new computer — I thought. It would be crazy to buy this thing. But the Genius, seemingly already abandoning me, was playing with some images and videos on the screen, simultaneously interweaving them, then dragging stuff from one section to another…and it was so…cool, beautiful. It looked so…fun,” Darden writes. “When I got home, and I hauled the boxes into the den, my wife simply shook her head.”
Full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Buffalo2001” for the heads up.]
For someone describing himself as “not remotely skilled” it is real easy for an Apple ‘genius’ to look like a genius.
Problem is, most of theses ‘geniuses’ are not remotely skilled themselves. Just go ask one why your Mac Pro keeps hanging up on something as consumer level as Garage Band, and they just don’t know why.
Real geniuses indeed, these guys.
Apple needs to make a commercial where the zombies have taken over the mall, but when they get to the Apple Store, they quit eating flesh and one ask “can this thing do speech recognition?” at which point he holds up his hands to reveal half eaten stubs, cocks his head to the side, everyone laughs, …..and scene!
“So, your average guy goes into an Apple Store for the first time and…”
Shits himself because he found great looking computers that actually work and run fast as hell.
And then he realized he had just awoken from the Mafia$oft Matrix he had been trapped in his whole life.
BOOM, HEAD SHOT!
Welcome, to a new friend.
The implication that parents are now signing away their children to Apple made me laugh.
wow, read the posts below his blog – they tear him a new one.
A nun, a priest, and a rabbi walk up to a Genius bar.
The Genius says “What is this a joke?”
<ba-dum bump>
There are millions, if not billions, of things that can go wrong with a computer. Combine that with the relative rarity of significant problems on a Mac, and you see that it’s entirely possible that the particular ‘Genius’ you spoke with might never have seen your specific problem before. Since you’re using a Mac Pro, it’s also highly likely that you’ve got lots of not so consumer level software that my be interfering with Garage Band.
Macs are generally trouble free, but that doesn’t mean you won’t ever need more help than the Geniuses can provide. Face it, you’ve got a Pro Mac, and you may actually have to pay a consultant for pro level support. It’s bound to happen at some point, and blaming the guy at the store isn’t going to change anything.
You might also try posting your problem on one of the Mac support sites like http://www.macfixit.com or the forums at http://www.osxhints.com
It is hilarious reading the readers comments below the article. Wow, the PC fans are upset! You can tell they were written by people who haven’t ever used a Mac. I think it is funny how most of the PC fans who hate Macs have never used one extensively, but most of the Mac fans who hate Windows used a PC for years, and chose to switch to Apple’s products.
“Apple ‘Geniuses’ Are Chick Magnets”
But biting their little yellow heads off just to amuse people waiting was not the best idea. You can take the geek out of the circus . . .
“It is hilarious reading the readers comments below the article. Wow, the PC fans are upset! You can tell they were written by people who haven’t ever used a Mac.”
Ditto to Mac vs PC threads on Fark. I read one the other day and i LOL’d at the ignorance.
That was a light, entertaining article that is important to the Mac community for one reason:
The author wasn’t a Mac user and had no axe to grind.
It illustrates why the Apple stores are so succesful, and why half of the buyers there are new to the Mac world. More importantly, the comments full of Windows apologists waxing profanely over his positive take on Apple are very illustrative of the affect the loss of market share is having on that community.
Uh oh…Apple has hired some professional Fan Boys….
This article is the biggest load of viral advertising crap I have ever read.
Just my $0.02
Mmm.. Are the chick Genius’s also chick magnets?
Good story though. And he got it spot on:
“Michael Dell & Other Consumer PC-Makers: It’s Over. Apple Has Won”
Check the full article; quite amusing. As for geniuses, he qualifies his statement no. 3 (Apple geniuses are real geniuses); he goes on to say: “Tech geniuses? I have no idea. Sales geniuses? You bet!”.
Most amusing part of the article is the feedback from frustrated Windows users. The level of ignorance (right-click!) is stupefying.
And the part about “geniuses” being chick magnet, this is not the first time I read something like this. A much more respectable newspaper (the New York Times) had an article about a year ago about the SoHo store in NYC being exactly that. Chicks (to use the euphemism from this article) would be lining up at the Genius bar, with their iPods and MacBooks, playing the modern ‘damsel in distress’ part, with full make-up and battle-dress (on Friday nights) batting eylashes and all. Geniuses would play the part too, providing advice, doing the ‘hand-holding’ (literally, too), and all this was obviously the Friday night mating dance. The point was, a journalist saw this as a clear trend, so much so that it warranted an article.
These types of articles are the million-dollar free advertising for Apple. Keep them coming, folks!
Re: the PC people commenting on the blog…
It’s still amazing how much people bring up the old yarns against apple.
I was playing chess online at Pogo.com (nerd announcement!) the other night and mentioned in chat conversation that I used a mac to my opponent. He proceeded to tell me that he wanted to be able to run more than just 5% of available software and that with windows he could run 95% of the software out there. I told him with my mac and it’s xp and linux partitions, I could run windows, linux, and Mac OSX. He didn’t say another word, lost the game, and left without any form of congratulations.
Checkmate… it was beautiful to see.
I’m curious about the picture of Steve Jobs…I’ve never seen one of them in the store!
Dear Penthouse Letters…
Jim TIV
Sounds like that guy was a pawn, and then proceeded to put the Rook back in rookie.
On the good side, you might have just captured his imagination in passing….
Funny article.
Get ready to read some of the most ignorant and idiotic vemon from PeeSea users you’ll ever see.
Game over.
RIP Windows 2009.
“He didn’t say another word, lost the game, and left without any form of congratulations.”
That’s what happens when you shit yourself. Sounds like a bad knight for that master of debate. Or his Windows crapbox seized up.
That’s what he gets for “sneaking” around.
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im not a fan of microsoft but i cant stand how cocky apple people becaem
Hey Easy Mark,
You MAY have a defective machine — I went ’round and ’round with Apple over my 4-core Mac tower — Apple would test it, and claim no faults found, several different times — in and out of the shop — long story short, I upgraded to a new 8-core tower, with proper credit from Apple for my returned, year-old 4-core (had AppleCare to prod them with) and ALL my problems disappeared — turns out, according to subsequent “off-the-record” conversations with certain “folks,” that some of the earlier 4-core machines have been showing intermittant problems, when used in particular, non-typical ways.
One of my complaints centered around FireWire external devices — occasional finder-copy errors if I had daisy-chained FW external hard-drives, which would disappear if I only had one FW drive connected to the external FW port at a time.
Good luck in resolving your complaints — I can tell you that the new 8-core machines are solid, reliable and very, very fast — particulary when populated with 10 GB of RAM — Parallels and Windows XP absolutely FLY !
Niffy