At one point I was the perfect Apple customer – I owned a Mac Laptop, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iSoul… everything but an AppleTV and Mobile Me account. Apparently it wasn’t enough for the replace-everything-in-two-years business model Apple had set up for their customers. I’m going to try to be as level-headed as I can in this post, but Apple has pushed me to the breaking point this week. I’ll explain….
A couple months back, the vibrate button on my iPhone stopped working. It wasn’t a huge deal, so I didn’t rush to get it fixed. I didn’t realize until later that my missed calls had skyrocketed because I couldn’t hear the ringer in my pocket. So I looked up the issue online and found out it’s fairly common and that Apple would try restoring it first and then replacing it if that didn’t work. I tested the restore solution to find out it didn’t fix anything (it’s like restarting your wireless router. You always try it and then call your internet service provider’s help line to have them tell you to try restarting it. Even though you explain that you already did that, you do it again to amuse them and…. IT’S FIXED! I still have no clue how that works.). Anyway, I took my iPhone into the Apple store to have it replaced. No problem there. The Genius Bar, while usually filled with snarky little mac fanboys, was helpful and quick. I got a replacement 3Gs and it was working, no problems. Although it didn’t have my settings yet, I could still use it before I restored it from my last backup saved the night before.
Why is there always a "Genius" wearing a stupid hat like that?
I get it home and plug it into my PowerBook to restore my settings. I select my backup from the night before and walk away to let it do its thing. A couple minutes later, I check on it and iTunes has stopped syncing. I was expecting this to take the annoying couple hours like it normally does to restore an iPhone, so I immediately knew something was wrong. When I picked up my phone, it was just a black screen with the white apple logo. I couldn’t get to the home screen or even reboot it. It gave me an error saying it was stuck in recovery mode and none of the google searches I did could help me troubleshoot it, so it was time for round 2 at the Genius Bar.
This time the “Genius” Bar wasn’t as helpful. First it was annoying that they made me register an appointment when there was nobody in front of me. I couldn’t just walk up and start talking to someone. I understand why they have that process, but when the store is empty and there are all these employees just standing around, they should just skip that step. Anyway, back to the real issue. I tried explaining what happened to the “Genius”, but like most macboys, his below average listening skills made him miss the part where I told him I was in the day before and this was a broken replacement iPhone. So he went through the same process of trying to restore it and he couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t boot up. By the second time I got through explaining the issue in extreme detail, he got it. He still tried to restore it because that’s apparently the solution to any problem the “Geniuses” have figured out. When the screen turned purple and started flashing green and yellow bars, he finally gave up and replaced the replacement iPhone.
After 30 minutes of this, I was just glad to walk out with a new (read refurbished, but new to me, so who cares) iPhone. Having been without a phone for an entire day, I tried calling my Dad to check in with my family in Cincinnati. The only problem was that I couldn’t hear anything. It said it was “calling”, but I couldn’t hear it ringing. I tried putting it on speakerphone, but that didn’t work. I could play voicemails and music, but nothing was coming out of the ear speaker at the top of the phone. Thankfully I hadn’t even made it half a block away from the Apple store, so I turned back to have the “Geniuses” look into this new problem. Once I got it, they couldn’t believe I was experiencing ANOTHER issue. Thank god this time they didn’t make me check in and didn’t bother restoring the phone. They just gave me another and I was out of the store in 10 minutes.
"Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name...." (points if you get the reference)
So now I’m on my third replacement iPhone in 2 days, but at least I didn’t have to pay for any replacements or put anything in the mail. It really could have been a lot worse. Apple’s warranty is the best out there. Period. If I had a Blackberry or Android phone, I would have had to deal with people at an AT&T or Verizon store who know even less about cell phone troubleshooting than Apple Store “Geniuses” and it would have been a much more difficult process to replace my phone. I wasn’t out of the woods though. The issues with my first replacement iPhone came up when I tried syncing it, so I knew that would be the test. I wasn’t going to trust this new phone until all of my music, apps and settings looked like my old phone.
As discussed in my previous post, I am the proud owner of a 15″ PowerBook G4 that I got at the end of my Sophomore year of college. It’s 5.5 years old, but it’s still hanging in there. Sadly, Apple has given it a 10 count and decided they’re done with it. I found this out when I tried upgrading my iPhone from iOS 4.1 to 4.2 and discovered the new update would only work on Mac OS 10.5 and my machine was a 10.4 (and because they switched to Intel processors after the version of my computer, I can’t upgrade to 10.5). To make matters worse, when I clicked on the “Update” button to download the new iPhone update, it acted like I was trying to update iTunes and kept telling me “You already have the latest version of iTunes”. I decided I’d just sync it and deal with the iOS upgrade problem at another time. Except this time iTunes had lost my backup from 2 days earlier! It showed up when I tried syncing the first replacement phone, but this time it was asking me to sync back to November. SUPER annoyed, I selected it anyway, but it only synced my photos, contacts and general settings…. no apps or music!
Somebody get this guy a scotch.
After making myself a stiff drink, I became determined to ninja my way out of this situation. I’m the DIGITAL ANALYST for Christ’s sake! I can’t let this little machine defeat me. I racked my brain for possible work-arounds to fix my syncing issue since restoring it didn’t work. I figured I’d try upgrading the iOS to 4.2 on my PC laptop. Of course this couldn’t be a simple process either. When iTunes finished downloading the file and was “processing” it, my “network timed out” and couldn’t finish downloading the file. I tried re-downloading it, restarting iTunes, restarting my computer… nothing worked. I googled the issue and a forum said to disable my Antivirus temporarily and that should fix it. While it did fix it and iTunes finished downloading the update, I was still annoyed I needed to disable my Antivirus protection in the first place. It’s a standard Antivirus program called Kaspersky that is given away with every laptop sold at Best Buy, so I know I’m not the only person who experienced the issue, but I digress…
I finished downloading the update and upgraded my phone to iOS 4.2. Hoping this would solve the sync issues I was having with my PowerBook, I plugged it in and crossed my fingers, but of course, nothing comes easy. Upgrading to iOS 4.2 made my iPhone completely incompatible with my old computer. iTunes won’t even recognize it and just spits an error back at me any time I try to make them play nice.
At this point, you must be wondering why I don’t just sync it with my new computer. Here’s why…. my iTunes music folder is saved on an external hard drive. I keep all my files there so if anything were to happen to my old laptop, everything important would be backed up externally. So when I got my new computer, I tried connecting it to the external hard drive, but nothing happened. The computer saw that something had been plugged in, but it wouldn’t let me open a folder or anything. Turns out, formatting it to work with my PowerBook made it incompatible with any 64-bit Windows operating system. So I couldn’t transfer the files or even access them from my new computer. I discovered this issue when I first bought this laptop and again tried to troubleshoot it online, download new drivers, etc. etc., but nothing worked. Since I don’t have a “Genius” Bar for my Samsung Laptop, I talked to the IT guy at my work.
Turns out that I could plug the hard drive into a new Mac and it would recognize it because the new Macs with intel processors have a driver necessary to read old Mac hard drives. So the solution was that I’d have to first transfer the files to a newer Mac with an intel processor, then reformat the hard drive to work with my PC, then transfer the files from the newer Mac back to my hard drive. That should in theory work.
Until I can get that worked out, I’m going to have to be patient. At least this phone seems to work, so I won’t have to go back and deal with any other “Geniuses”. A problem for the interim was that I don’t really use my phone as a phone. I really use it for the apps. I’m addicted to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, HuffingtonPost and Solitaire, so without those apps, my phone feels worthless. Well, while I was updating my iOS, I changed the email address used as my login from an old account to a newer one, thinking it wouldn’t be an issue. Sadly, I changed it right after my phone had synced, so it was still using my old email address as my iTunes username and I couldn’t change it to my new one.
This was an easy problem though. I’d just re-sync my phone and it would recognize my new iTunes account settings. Easy peasy one two thre…. ERROR! I guess Apple thought I hadn’t experienced enough crazy-stupid issues over the past 24 hours, so it tossed this curveball at me. It was saying I needed verify my account AND that my account was verrified in the SAME ERROR MESSAGE! Had hell just frozen over? I couldn’t believe it. Of course I turned to Google and found a post from someone having the same issue:
I really thought I’d seen it all, but this was a new level of WTF APPLE?! I followed the steps from the linked issue above and finally fixed my iTunes account after working on it for close to an hour. At least now I’ve downloaded my most important apps, so I can make it through until I transfer my external hard drive and can restore from my backup registered in November. I’m not even expecting to recover the backup I made 3 nights ago… part of me is just giving up after all of these iSsues.
For those of you who have made it this far into my longest post here, I apologize for the rant. You’re probably thinking, “You’re the Digital Analyst dude. You should understand tech becomes obsolete and buy gadgets more often” and there’s some truth to that. My problem with this whole situation is that it could have been avoided, but Apple decided my computer was obsolete. It wasn’t that it stopped working or that iTunes wouldn’t work on it or anything else. I mean, it’s not even 6 years old. I’m mad because I bought a $2000+ laptop 5 years ago and assumed it would work for at least this long, but really I expected it to go 7 years before I recycled it for the metal. I expect 2 year life cycles on iPods and iPhones, but a computer is a much bigger investment.
Is 5 years the maximum shelf life we can expect from computers now? I’m sure if I asked a “Genius” at an Apple Store that they’d tell me their new MacBook Pros will last longer than that, because that’s what they told me when I bought my PowerBook 5 years ago. That’s why I upgraded the ram when it started slowing down. That’s why I manually took the entire machine apart to replace the keyboard after some coke had been spilled on it. I invested time and money into keeping that laptop chugging along, but then Apple decides to stop supporting Mac OS 10.4 and I’m screwed.
What would happen if Microsoft decided to stop supporting Windows XP? People would be up in arms! Rioting in the streets. They bought computers 5 years ago that still work just fine today and then Microsoft decides to drop them? That’s not how you treat customers who have been loyal to your product for this long. Of course Microsoft will eventually stop supporting XP and new updates will only be available for Vista and Windows 7 computers, but at least they’re supporting their products and proving that they can still works 5 years later.
