OK, yes I’ve become a Apple Fan-boy but it’s only because they continue to exceed my expectations. This week is no exception. They have gone way beyond my wildest dreams when it comes to making things right!
I just had the company purchase me a new iMac 24 inch, 2.8 GHz a few weeks ago. I got it all configured as I wanted but when it was delivered to me I had some hard drive issues. I purchased Disk Warrior and for the most part I was able to get the drive fixed. However there was some Graphic card issues where the computer would lock up after a few hours of heavy GPU usage. This was really starting to get on my nerves because I purchased 4 macs over the years I’d never experienced these issues ever before. (I still have my G5 from 2003 and its been my work horse, but that is why I got the iMac to finally replace it).
We’ll I was going to wait and see if the next build of OS X 10.5.3 would fix some of the issues. However, on Monday I get an email from Apple telling me about their great new iMacs! Damn it! I just purchased a new iMac, and I’m having issues with it and to rub it in my face they release a new one with a ton of upgrades and it’s only $80 more.
So now I’m really upset! So I decided to call Apple Care and to see if they can do something about this iMac that’s not running as good as it should. I’m expecting that I’m going to have a fight on my hands.
Ahh…..nope! I call Apple Care and I actually get a person in less than 1 minute! (At its 1pm PST) I can’t tell you the last time I got anyone at Dell in under 30 minutes! I tell the rep the problem I’m having and she tells me “no problem! Let’s see if we can get this resolved for you”. She puts me on hold for a few minutes and comes back on the phone and tells me that she’s going to redirect my call to the sales department and they will get me a full refund. So I talk to them and they tell me they are going to email me a fedex return code and when they receive the computer back I will get a full refund!
So that’s not even the best part. I get the FedEx return code and I’m able to print out the label so that FedEx can come pick up the defective computer. I then get another email from Apple with a $50 coupon off my next purchase! WOW! I never even asked for that and they they sent this to me for my problems. Then around 8:00 at night I get a call from Apple (It went to voicemail)! Holy Crap! When have you ever had Dell call you back? She tells me she wants to make this right. She gives me a direct number to call them in the morning and to see if they can get me a new computer.
I call her back but it goes to voice mail. I leave my message. 2 hours later I get a call back from her and she offers to exchange the bad iMac that I’m sending back for a brand new one and they will wave the $80 difference. She also tells me that I can still use my coupon later for anything I want from Apple!
Because the old Mac was already being sent back via FedEx, she immediately released the new iMac and changed the delivery from ground to over night and it will be here tomorrow! (Which she did not have to do either!)
Apple fan or not, this is the BEST customer service I’ve EVER encountered!
If you’ve not joined the Apple family, and if this does not convince you why you should, nothing will!
This is one of many reasons I made the switch a few years ago and this is why I’m an Apple user for life!!
I’ve had my iPhone for about 8 months now and there was an issue with the side buttons on the phone that controlled the volumne and the mute. They stopped working one day for reasons unknown. So I headed down to San Diego to the Apple store fearing the worst. I’d figure I’d have to fight to get them to fix it. Well I got into the store, talked the Genious Bar dude. He took a look, told me hold on a second and came out with a new iPhone and put my SIM chip into the new phone! Wow. I thought they were going to send it in, I’d be out without a phone a while. Nope. Brand new phone! Now that’s what I like.
I remember having an issue with my phone when I was with Sprint and they would find any excuse not to replace the phone. I had a minor scratch on the phone (normal wear and tear) and the guy said I must have damaged it on purpose so they are not going to replacement. My wife also had an issue and they would not replace it for free because they said she had split Coke on it. WTF. She does not even drink Soda! That is why the phone carriers should be very worried about Apple getting into their market because the days of screwing over the consumer are over. Now the ultimate would be for them to get off of AT&T and become their own provider!! (one can only dream)
What I was laughing my ass off about this video is a few months back I was chatting with a Microsoft Employee who happens to be in Sales. He said the almost the exact same line as the video. He said in so many words ”Some Enterprises did not deploy Vista because they don’t want to Adopt early but that going to be over with SP1″. When he said it to me, I was thinking then, Man he is really drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid. Now after watching this video I’m convinced its now a PIC line directly to the heart. I also had to bit by tongue and not ask him about all the people who have rolled back to XP.
I used both OS X and I’m a switcher (no not to OS X, I did that already, but back to XP) but I still have one machine running Vista. What’s even more depressing is that the machine has still not done the auto update to SP1. I talked to another Microsoft employee who works there for a long time now but does not always give me the company line told me it will not update my computer until the issues for certain drivers on my machine have been resolved. If I try to update SP1 on its own it will fail! Some Service Pack! All the more reason to stay with XP and wait for XP SP3.
The last couple of days my iPhone has been locking up to the point where I would have to hard reset it every 10 minutes. I’ve been planning on going to the Apple store but I’ve been working at home all week.
Being a software dork, I was beginning to notice patterns with the phone. It did not work well at home, but if I went down to Starbucks, to the movies or hockey my iphone would work!
What is the one thing that is different about being at home beside AT&T service sucking and having 2 bars if I’m lucky, was that I have wifi at home. I turned off the wifi on the iphone and guess what, it started working again!
WTF? Why would that be? I then realized that I had changed the wifi keys on the wireless routers at the home because my teenage daughter has been grounded from the internet. I thought all was good because I had changed the passwords on the computers but she was caught using her PSP and Wii to browse the net. Instead of worrying about every wifi enabled device in the house (which is plenty), I changed the keys.
What would you know, the iPhone has a bug if you change the key of an existing router without reseting the key on the phone. It would be interesting to see if others have had the same problem.
This week I went to down to the Apple Store and purchased myself a new iPhone! I know everyone has been talking about how great the iPhone is but I really had no idea how good it was until I had it in my hands for a couple of days. The user interface is amazingly easy to use and beautiful. There is no way in hell I could use a Microsoft smart phone after having an iPhone in my possession.
If one thing that I wish it had was full integration with Exchange. However, I ‘m able to get my work emails via IMAP to our Exchange server. Sure, I don’t get calendar support but I’m not away from my computer that often during working hours. I keep all of my personal calendar information in iCal, which tends to be the events that I miss because its when I’m not working is when I’m notified.
The setup had to be the best and quickest experience I’ve ever had in activating phone service. I unpacked the phone and inserted the cradle’s USB cable into my Mac. iTunes then came up and I answered a couple of very simple questions. I had switched over to AT&T last month because I knew I wanted to have an iPhone. After I tell them some security questions with my phone number and then pick a data package my phone is literally activated in 5 minutes! I was now able to make and receive calls.
The integration with iLife is to me is the best feature. I picked my music,videos and photos I want to have on the iPhone. The software detected my email configurations on my mac and asked me if I want to use these accounts! Finally, my iCal and Address book were synced to the phone. The camera takes really good photos (not as good as my regular camera but these photos are good!) and to my surprise, when I docked the iPhone to charge it, the camera photos were automatically added to iPhoto! The hand gestures to use the iPhone are extremly simple and intitive! No complicated menus (God, I hated the interface on my Razor) and within minutes you know where everything is.
The iPhone will detect if there is a wireless connection available to use instead of the AT&T data network. So when I come home, the iPhone automatically uses the wi-fi connection!
Instead of sitting with my notebook on the couch when watching tv, I found my self the last couple days using my iPhone instead. This is the best browser for any mobile device. It’s a REAL browser and looks exactly like the web page that I see on my computer.� The hand gestures allows you to zoom in or zoom out by either moving your fingers out or in.
I know a person who complained that it did not support Flash and that is why he’s not getting one. Personally I don’t give a shit about Flash support and there is not that many sites I go to that use Flash. You know however Apple is working with ADOBE to have a Flash version . If this is the only reason he’s not getting it then I have a feeling its more that he does not want to spend the money!
Others in the blogosphere have complained that it does not have IM support (not an issue for me), a video camera (I have a Hi Def Video cam so why would I want to have it my phone?), you can’t add multiple people to same text message(this is a feature I want, but I can live without it), no active sync with Exchange (my biggest “Want/Wish”) and finally no flash support (which I could care less but I bet this is one of the new additions before the end of the year).
Overall the iPhone rocks and I can’t find any reason why I would ever want to go back to the using a “Cell” phone or even a smartphone!
I never thought the day would come when I find out people like Mike Gunderloy have had it with Microsoft! I don’t know Mike personally but I know several people (including my old boss) that were really tight with him. His name would come up all the time as “The Microsoft Expert”. Back when I was getting started in the consulting business, Mike G and Ken Getz where the Access 2.0 Gods!
The last couple of months I’ve been extremely busy and had zero time to go and read all my RSS Feeds or even add entries to my blog. (My five fans are now probably gone too!) Today reading through my other feeds I found that Mike G had a new site called “A fresh Cup”. I started going through Mike’s site and came across an entry that he’s had enough with Microsoft. Hell, he even bought himself a Macbook Pro! If it was still April I would have thought that this was an extended April fools joke! I don’t know all the details but something must have been pulling him away for a while. I don’t think it’s just the one thing that made him decide to really try to no use anything created from Microsoft.
I really hope that Mike G can work it out because his expertise is something the community can not afford to lose!
Wow! I never thought I would admit it but I really do like, no love, Windows Vista. I’ve installed it on my desktop computer and it’s been for the most part a very good experience. However, I don’t recommend it for notebooks at the moment. The two notebooks I have tried it on, runs a bit sluggish. As long as you have a new machine, with at least 2 gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card, Vista is beautiful. The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on my desktop and when I go to use my Macbook pro notebook, it feels a bit dated. Maybe it’s the Aero theme that has me hooked or the new sleek UI but whatever it is I’m hooked.
I did have some problems with the sound card drivers at first but I was able to get this resolved after digging through the forums. The other real problem I had was with Visual Studio 2005 not running as smooth as it should. This was resolved when I updated Visual Studio 2005 to Service Pack 1 and found a Vista update for Visual Studio 2005 sp1. After updating VS2005, it’s been working pretty well!
I did have to turn off the infamous “Cancel or Allow” dialogs! (If you’ve seen the new Apple commercial and have been using Vista, you know how true it is with dealing with that annoying dialog box.) This “interruption” was driving me bonkers. So much so I hated the whole Vista experience at first. I was about 10 minutes into reinstalling Windows XP, when I found out I could turn this off (The Apple commercial stated this could be done! Thanks Apple!!) and things got a lot better from there.The Speech recognition in Vista is AMAZING! I tried it out the other day and I’m truly impressed on how good it was. I won’t go into it here but it has come a long way!
The other thing that may have had a positive influence is the new Office 2007. At first I was extremly worried about what Microsoft did to Office with the new Ribbon feature, but after using it to write some documents at work, I could not believe that this was not thought of sooner!
Well there you have it. A switcher that is not afraid to admit he likes something else beside OS X. The good news is I’ll have a new version of OS X in the next month or so. Hopefully I can fall back in love with my Apple again. I’m sure I will!
Oh! I almost forgot! My Seven year old son was asking to use the computer and he noticed it was no longer running Windows XP. He said to me “Is this a new Mac dad?” HAHA…That’s it! I like Windows Vista because it looks so much like OS X!!
I purchased a new 15 inch mac book pro from the Apple store this week and I must say I’m more than impressed with the performance! I have Windows running under Parallels Virtual Machine. Running Windows in a virtualization machine has exceeded my expectations.
In the past I’ve used Virtual PC for OS X and the performance was just OK. I really did not use VPC much because the performance was not what I was used to. If the speed is slowing me down (or the perception), I would rather get on another computer and do my work.
However, that is not the case with using Parallels on my new notebook. It’s as fast as running Windows XP on my P4 3.4 ghz desktop. I’m running Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 in VM and the performance is as good or better than my desktop.
I ‘m running a new beta version of Parallels that has improved many issues. They are coming up with more improvement very soon. One that caught my eye is that you’ll be able to run your games in the Virtual Machine and it will take advantage of your graphics card! Now that is impressive!
Based on my brother’s feedback with the amount of memory needed to run the VM and OS X at the same time, I went down Fry’s and bought an other Gig of RAM for $90! The Apple store wanted $300! That’s just nuts! (I’m sure its great memory but its not worth 3 times as much). With 2 Gigs of RAM, this machine is smoking fast!
Now when I am developing I can use Parallels and then with an alt+Enter key stroke, I can be back in OS X, checking email, viewing my RSS feeds and listening to music! (Well I can still listen to the OS X itunes when in the VM also) This is the best of both worlds!
I did use my external firewire drive to install the Virtual Machine. It does seem to be faster than running the VM from the internal hard drive. I’m not sure if this true, but it feels like it. I did this because it will avoid filling up my 100 gig hard drive. The other reason is when I replace my G5 desktop with the new Mac Pro, I can simply hook the external drive to that machine to work on it from home. I still perfer to use a desktop with a large monitor at home instead of a notebook.
I really don’t think Microsoft is going to get hurt by all the people switching to using Mac hardware. I think the company that is fearing these new computers is Dell.
Microsoft is stilling going to make money because people need Windows when they are using Bootcamp or Parallels, but Dell is going to lose people by the fact you can run Windows and OS X on the same machine. Plus Apple computers just look so much cooler!
I doubt there will ever be a time where I’ll have no need to use Windows. With the abilty to run both operating systems on the same machine, it made total sense to finally switch my notebook over to an Apple.
A few months ago my brother was at the Dell cart in the mall and made the bad choice of buying a new notebook. I warned him on the poor quality of Dells lately and how I and many people I know are having problems with Dell computers. I told him he should have bought a new Mac book pro instead. (now that they can run Windows XP via a direct boot or through an emulator)
Within a couple of weeks he was having all kinds of problems with the Dell. We would stop by the Apple store every couple of weeks and I kept rubbing it in that he should have purchased a new Mac book pro.
Last week he purchased the 17 inch Mac book pro. Within a couple of hours he was calling me to tell me how he was blown away by the features that came with his new computer and wish he had made the switch earlier.
He also purchased Parallels, a Windows Emulator for intel computers running OSX. Within a couple of hours he had Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 running. When I came over to see how it ran, I was really impressed! However things were a bit sluggish on the OSX side. The problem was he allocated 600 megs to the emulator and only 300 megs to OSX. I told him to get more memory and things should improve.
He called me today and said he put in an additional gig and he said everything is running the way it should. He allocated a gig to OSX and a gig to Parallels.
I know my next notebook will be a Mac. I still have to pay off this !#$%@ Dell that I hate because I still have a few months left in my lease. I count the days….
On Friday I had created a presentation for my kids school. I’ve done the 8th grade graduation presentation for the last couple of years. I get all the images and video from each student and use Keynote and iLife create it on my Mac. I can create a very professional presentation that can be watched from a DVD very quickly.
However, I don’t have a portable Mac so each year I’ve played the DVD on my Dell notebook. I’ve been running Windows XP and it’s been pretty reliable. However a couple of weeks ago, I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on my notebook.
Today I went down to the school, did test run and it played great in Windows Media Center. When it came time to showing the presentation (about 1.5 hours after the test run), Windows Media center decides to die. I kid you not! The exact moment when I have over 300 people waiting to watch the presentation, Media center crashes. Then a few minutes later Windows Vista Crashes! I had to reboot the computer while the principal and my wife are worried that we may not be able to play the presentation.
After the presentation my wife starts laughing and says that does not say much for Microsoft’s new operating system! I know, it’s a Beta, but by the time you’re in Beta 2, the core OS should be stable enough that something this trivial should not happen.
I can guarantee you next year, I’ll be doing everything on that new Mac book pro I’ve been waiting to get!
I know everyone has been talking about how great the 
Wow! I never thought I would admit it but I really do like, no love, Windows Vista. I’ve installed it on my desktop computer and it’s been for the most part a very good experience. However, I don’t recommend it for notebooks at the moment. The two notebooks I have tried it on, runs a bit sluggish. 
