Tag Archives: iMac

The Apple Store Didn’t Want My Money

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I am sure sales staff at the Boise Towne Square Mall Apple Store wanted me to make a purchase, but they didn’t want to earn it. I spent a while before writing this in order to present my experience in a calm way. I also spent a while trying to decide how to begin this article, but know I am writing it not on a new iMac that I drove an hour out of my way to purchase tonight. Before I get into my experience at the Apple Store this evening, let me take you back to Tuesday May 3rd, 2011.

That Tuesday the new iMac Quad-Core machines hit the shelves. I spent a little time Tuesday night going over all the specs and decided that I wanted to purchase with my hard earned dollars. That night I put my mid 2009 model 24” iMac up on Craigslist. I received many offers and ended up with a buyer, however the buyer seemed flaky as I could narrow down a time to complete the sale. Finally today (May 5th, 2011) I completed the sale after many phone calls and text messages. Bottom line it was stressful selling the iMac and not the best of times to sell anything on Craigslist.

Fast forward to a 25 minute drive from my home to the BTSM Apple Store. I arrive excited to purchase the new iMac. It should also be noted my last few experiences in the BTSM Apple Store have been far from stellar. Both were purchases of an iPad, which saw the Apple Store employees being aggressive in not honoring my employee discount. It is a discount from a major US Company and it has been a quite the teeth pulling exercise for the BTSM store to honor the discount.

I digress. Here I am going through what I want with the Apple Sales Person on a floor model and “he says ok, hit add to cart”. I look at him as he was kidding and he was not. The reason given what the Apple Store only carries the base 1TB model. I was really, you don’t carry 2TB models. His answer is still no, not “no I am sorry and some explanation”, but just a plain no. I tell him that I had called earlier and asked if the store had 2TB models and the answer was yes. I repeated  to the Apple Store employee, so you carry 1 and 2 TB models. The answer yes we do.

As I wanted a new machine tonight, I decided to sacrifice the 2 TB model and upgrade the memory. It should be noted that the Apple Store can upgrade the memory with no issues. As I head up to pay the sales person hands me a Track Pad that I had requested. As I am waiting for the iMac I begin commenting that Apple is smart not to include either the Magic Mouse or Trackpad in the box and having the choice was great.

Newimac

The sales person then responds to me something to the affect that oh you will have to buy the Trackpad separately as the iMacs come pre-stocked with the Magic Mouse. I tell him that is not how the Apple Store states it on the Apple website. It should be noted that the BTSM Apple Store employee was unaware of the option to choose. He had to be educated by another employee and myself. It is at this point I dropped the need to purchase at the store that evening. I drove home purchased a new 21.5”, 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 4GB of RAM and a 2TB Serial ATA Drive. I received my employee discount with no problem and it is due to arrive sometime in a week.

I know many will say that this is normal. I call bunk. Boise has had an Apple Store since September of 2010 and I have had the luxury of having a Genius Bar to fix an iPhone and iPod Touch since that time. However, purchasing items the local Apple Store has been a huge disappointment in my opinion. The request I had was not much. I wanted a 2TB model and upgraded processor, with a Magic Track Pad and I am still not sure how I didn’t walk out of the Apple Store with a new iMac.

I won’t bother you with what I think Apple should do, since many of us know Apple doesn’t really do much of what the customer wants but rather what they want. It is stupid in my opinion that Apple is not as flexible with buyers. It is also astonishing to me that I have had such terrible service the last few times I have made or attempted to make purchases.

To me having a local store is not an improvement on the prior situation facing local Boise Apple Product buyers previously. At least with the reseller one could have more of an option in what was purchased, well of course that was after a few weeks wait for its stock to arrive. Bottom line the waste of time and gas makes buying at the local BTSM pointless, when I am not going to receive the level of customer service and product I want. In the end the BTSM store wanted my money, but had no way of earning it and it likely will not any time soon. Oh, and writing this on a Windows Machine makes me feel dirty.

Why I didn’t buy an iPad

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The iPad dropped a little over a week ago, I a huge Apple fan boy resisted and did not dive in head first and buy an iPad. The reasons are simple, but not overwhelming. The first reason revolves around the fact the iPad did not provide me any key feature that I didn’t already have with other electronic devices in my possession.

Unlike the iPod I didn’t have a big need to use it as a eReader for eBooks, or iBooks, whatever Apple had decided it should be called. I am not a big reader and to be honest still find actual paper books more appealing than an electronic version.

The other thing is I own a 24 inch iMac. At the time it was the biggest screen Apple offered. I like a big screen and prefer a larger screen versus a small 10 inch screen. As @PilotPete put it on a recent episode of the Mac Geek Gab, using the iPhone or iPad is like viewing the world through a straw.

This could not be any truer. I use my iPhone when I am away from home, but prefer to do my computing via a computer. Andy Ihnatko tweeted this weekend complaining about the iPad WordPress app crashing on him, losing 2 drafts. I thought writing a blog post would be nice via the iPad, but it doesn’t feel secure enough to risk losing  hard work without actually using a text editor to create the post.

Speaking applications, it would appear that many of the iPad versions of iPhone apps need to be repurchased for the new platform. This should not come as a big shock and I don’t mind paying the developers for the applications, but paying full price seams a bit much.

The applications that I tested at the local Best Buy Demo table, were however fantastic, but as I said before I can get the same out of my iMac, MacBook or even my iPhone. Of course if I were to buy one I would want the 3G version and I would likely wait for the second or even third revision before purchasing.

Believe me I wanted a new Apple toy, but in the end I could not see a need, but to all my fellow Apple fan boys and girls I hope you’re happy with your purchases, but for me there wasn’t enough there to buy an iPad.

My Apple Life

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In his editor’s note in the March 2010 edition of Macworld, Jason Snell penned a great quote

“ The entire point of Apple’s products is that they are not interchangeable with anybody else’s. Only one company makes Macs, iPhones, and iPods, and that’s Apple.”

That statement was never more truer then after last nights experience I had trying to hack my Apple TV with Boxee. The hack ended up rendering my Apple TV useless, leading me to  a factory restore (hold down the menu button and the minus button at the same time until it reboots). In the past I loved to tinker with computer related equipment and normally the Boxee hack would have proceed, that was until I purchased my first Mac back in 2006.

You see I have swallowed the Apple Kool-Aid and like a cold glass of Grape, with a little extra sugar, its fantastic. I own a iMac, a MacBook, a iPhone, a Apple TV and several iPods. I would eventually love to own an iPad.

The geek in me loves new gadgets and over the last few years my gadgets have centered around Apple. All my Apple devices work with each other without any issues and the software is top notch. I have run 3 versions of OS X as a Mac user. I enjoy the community of MacHeads as they are simply head and shoulders above the rest.

Back In January in an attempt to get back to my tinkering ways, I purchased an HTC Droid Eris. Though I thought it was a great phone for the price it just didn’t fit my Apple lifestyle, and as Jason stated, it just wasn’t “interchangeable” with Apple. Not only that the Android community was not up to the challenge like my fellow MacHeads. So I took the phone back to Verizon Wireless and purchased an iPhone, ending my 12 plus year relationship with Big Red.

As a side note I later came across an article in the March 2010 issue of MacLife that listed the 10 steps in which you could sync your Android phone with a Mac. Yes ten steps to match the one you complete with an iPhone and iTunes. Not this is not the 10 steps upon set up but rather the ten steps each time. Setting up an iPhone takes a few steps at first but after that is is simply one step. Best of all I don’t have to tell the iPhone to mount on my Mac like an Android phone.

When it comes to my Apple products its like what Steve Job’s says “it just works.” Yes they all just work and that is alright by me. Now that may not be for everyone. At times I wish Apple would do a little more, but I don’t complain. Typically search google and find the third party app that will do what I am looking for.

I also love my OS X software that I have purchased over the years, and iTunes had been the go to app for me since I first used it on the Windows side. I still work in a Windows environment during the day and its in an operating system (XP) that is nearly 10 years old. It is safe to say it is an operating system that has gone past its recommended shelf life. Like an old gallon of milk, it needs to be thrown away. After a week at work its nice to come home and work with my Apple gadgets and delve into my Mac Life.

The Mac lifestyle has been good to me and I for one am satisfied living in my Apple Lifestyle.

My Airport Connection Timed Out

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I ran into the most annoying thing I have experienced on a Mac. This past Saturday night my iMac would not connect to the router. I had been connected an hour earlier, but for some reason it would not connect.  I was getting a “connection timeout” message.

wpa-connection-timeoutSo began my troubleshooting of the problem. First I assumed there may be something wrong with the router. I unplugged both the power and phone line, but still the connection timed out. To double check I fired up the MacBook, which connected without issue.

Perplexed, I went to the utilities folder and opened up Keychain and deleted all the networks. This proved to make things worse as now my airport could not find a single network. This then turned me to search the Internet to find a solution. In doing so I found this post on the Apple discussions board. There were many ideas, but this one made progress.

Has anyone tried this fix. I don’t have access to my MBP right now to try myself.

1. Go to Finder > Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences
2. Pull SystemConfiguration folder onto the desktop
3. Restart
4. Go System Preferences > Network
5. Select “New Location” under the Location drop down menu and give it a name
6. Select “Airport” under the show drop down menu
7. Go to By default, join: and you can leave it on automatic or with preferred networks and select or add your network
8. Click “Apply Now” and all should hopefully be golden
9. If all is good, trash the folder on your desktop

After following the instructions and opening my connection I was able to connect on the iMac. So I thought success. However, I could not leave the Internet connection open due to security issues. I switched back to WPA, but it resulted in a lost connection. After an hour of frustration, I found this article. Moreover, I found the root of my problem.

I finally decided to take a look at the Mac firewall logs. You’d think that would be the first place I’d look, being a security guy. They’re kind of hidden in plain sight, a few layers deep in the Mac’s preferences dialogs. You go to the System Preferences panel, in the Security section, then the Firewall tab, then click the Advanced button, and finally click the Open Log button. If logging isn’t already turned on, you can enable it there, as well.

Sure enough, I looked in the log and found several examples of this (emphasis mine):

Feb 8 23:02:04 greg-hughess-macbook-air Firewall[39]: Deny configd data in from 192.168.0.1:67 uid = 0 proto=17
Feb 8 23:02:26: — last message repeated 2 times —

Ah hah… Apparently the firewall was refusing inbound connections initiated by the router as it tried to set up the DHCP address being requested by the laptop.

In followed the instructions, but still no success. Then it came to me, if it is the firewall and some how the com.apple.alf.plist file had become messed up, why not use Time Machine and revert back to when the file was working. SUCCESS!!!!!!!

After restoring a previous version of the com.apple.alf.plist file I was able to connect. I have no clue what I did to cause the firewall problem, but it appears the issue was a result of the Leopard firewall blocking some kind of handshake between my Airport and the Router verifying the WPA key.  Thank goodness for Time Machine.