Grounded!

Apple’s hardware diagnostic program doesn’t mince words

The near-impossible has happened—my computer has a problem that actually made me take it in to the Apple Store yesterday. Our appointment was for 10AM, and when we strolled down the mall toward the store, we spotted it a few hundred feet away—it was the only store with a line of people out front. An employee came out and divided the queue into those who had appointments, and those who were desperately hoping some iPad 2s were in stock. When we approached the back of the store, there must have been 30 or so yellow-Apple-logo-shirted school kids who were finishing up a lesson in video editing. Throughout the rest of the store were lookers at every table, poking at the vast array of Apple products from the tiniest iPods to the gigantic Mac Pros, with their 16 processors and vast terabytes of memory.

Meanwhile I have been demoted to using a mere 15"-screen MacBook Pro, a nice computer if you’re just going to play, but definitely not something I use at work where I have three or more large windows from various programs open at once, with constant switching back and forth.

Fortunately my three-year warranty still had a healthy nine days remaining, and that gets extended for another 90 days after the repair, kind of a warranty warranty. The technician was running lots of diagnostics which showed the necessity for even deeper looking. He started a program that would, he said, probably take more than an hour. Could we find something to do for that hour, he asked. “Gosh, I don’t know,” I said. “In an Apple Store? We’ll try not to get bored.”

We asked one of the Apple folks about integrating iPads into our daily operation at the high ranch, and got re-introduced to a very knowledgeable woman whom we had dealt with before. She remembered us and the ranch and had all kinds of new info for us since the introduction of the iPad had changed the game considerably. With her help, we found that we could speed things up, do less work, and save money at the same time. She’ll have more-specific information for us when we return to pick up the sick baby when it’s all healed and has a new heart.