Détente

*I feel I should point out up front that I wrote this piece on Tuesday morning, prior to the tragic news of Steve Jobs' death. Despite my clearly defined allegiance to the Cult of PC, it is impossible to minimize the impact Steve Jobs has had on the face of technology, computing and even the fabric of our culture. It is hard to imagine a world of technological innovation without Steve Jobs in it.*

A cold war rages in my home, a now nearly generational divide that has created occasional flash points of hostilities along hastily drawn borders. It is a conflict that on the surface seems clearly defined but belies deep complexities based on crude assumptions and age-old prejudices, and though there have been many olive branches extended through barred gates, the roots of bias run deep and hold fast.

Here’s the thing. My wife is a Mac person. I am not.

Detente is a meaningful word in my home, because despite the fact that the two platforms have become virtually indistinguishable from one another over the years, the dispute is no longer predicated on the reality of the situation. Now the debate is merely a series of tactical standoffs in which open hostility is only just barely averted. These skirmishes, in truth, are the exception as opposed to the rule, if only because we have seen what happens when such encounters spiral out of control.

So, when the need arises to bring more Apple products into the house, I generally bite my tongue and accept that the platform is ideal for my wife’s graphic-design roots. In return, she indulges me when I start talking about how much I want to replace my desktop, despite the fact that she has been exclusively portable for more than 3 years and can’t imagine the horror of being beholden to the confines of a desk.

I mention all of this only to illustrate my predisposition when we arrived at the Apple Store a week ago to replace my wife’s laptop.

When I paint the word-picture of my wife, I want you to remember this part. When my son last week spilled a full glass of orange juice onto my wife’s Macbook Pro, her immediate reaction was to comfort him and take responsibility for having the glass of juice anywhere near the laptop in the first place. This, despite the immediate sense of catastrophe that must have come from watching that pulpy liquid seep into the vulnerable spaces of a now doomed system. The result was unequivocal, and our response never wandered into the hopeless spaces of asking whether the system could be saved. It was immediately evident that we may have well tried to prevent the sun from setting. The only question was how best to rescue the data.

While I sat at work deliberately not trying to calculate costs in my head, a day was spent by my wife at the Apple “Genius Bar.” The geniuses, perhaps huddling in a conclave of super-intelligence suspended in a fourth-dimensional hyper cube, returned a verdict that matched ours, and by the afternoon we were well down a path of purchasing a new laptop and determining the best way to rebuild and restore as quickly as possible.

By the time I got home that afternoon, a lot of decisions had been made. We decided that our son was not at fault for any major transgression, and that the accident had not happened due to malice or irresponsibility on his part. We had decided to try and recover as much data as possible directly from the hard drive of the old computer. We had decided not to try and have them repair the machine, and we had decided to go back to the Apple Store and buy a replacement laptop.

Mac people, if I may grossly and perhaps inaccurately generalize for a moment, are not exactly my people. My religion is one in which DOS commands are holy texts. In the Mall of America, the Apple Store is directly across from a Microsoft Store, and the air between the two is electric, like standing between two high-powered, oppositely charged electromagnets. As I walked into the undiscovered country of silver and white, I immediately noticed how the staff seemed to maintain an impeccable image that I automatically interpreted as casual superiority. A trendy looking girl with nerd-goddess glasses intercepted me as we approached the back of the store — where the geniuses are perhaps held in suspended animation, their precious genes lovingly attended to by nanites — glanced down at her iPad and asked if she could help me in a way that would have been interpreted by a universal translator as, “You look like the sort of person who doesn’t have an appointment and probably shouldn’t be back here.”

At a nearby table, a twenty-something with spiky hair and scraggly facial hair that should have seemed disheveled except that it was so very meticulously made up to look such, was indulging a group of elderly people with basic computer instruction. Not a single person, customer or employee, seemed to not be holding some shiny, almost clinical-looking device. Everything, down to the iPads being used as glorified price tags for the demo computers, felt crafted to serve to a single image: the Apple image.

Two people emerged from the back and held extended discussions with my wife about transferring data from damaged drives to a new machine, and the potential hazards of countless possible incompatibilities between old and new operating systems, old and new versions of software, and old and new computers. Countless possible permutations were devised, discussed, disseminated and dismissed, and over the next hour and a half I had plenty of time to evaluate and judge my surroundings. As I sat on an aggrandized foam ball that apparently constituted a chair in this strange place, I felt a like a Stranger in a Strange Land. I began to tweet on my Android device of hipsters and pretensions.

After what felt like a very long time, I was happy to make my escape from this land of skinny jeans and ironic shirts, which is where the story should end leaving you and I both with familiar and tired cliches that for me too often make opaque the veil between what I interpret and the absolutely critical details.

Rewind for a moment and recall some important factors I just mentioned.

  • My wife’s afternoon spent at the Genius Bar, working with people to figure out the best solution for her.
  • Being greeted immediately and directed where I could get the most help upon arrival.
  • The kid whose job it was to help people learn how to use their computer, working away patiently to provide human support.
  • Two knowledgeable associates who spent more than an hour with my wife helping her figure out exactly what she needed and, more importantly, what would work.
  • And, the one detail I did not actually provide to you yet: the person who stayed late that night to mount the damaged drive and accelerate the data transfer so she could have it for work the next day.

The result was a fully functioning replacement, set up to the specifications we requested and able to allow my wife to pick up her work seamlessly from where she left off. Sure, the people who came to my wife’s rescue that day may have seemed devout clerics of the Apple religion, but they also knew what the hell they were talking about and could analyze the situation with a high degree of both insight and accuracy.

I wondered, would I have received the same kind of response and support among “my people?” Would Microsoft Store employees have nearly leapt across the room to begin offering detailed analysis and more than an hour of customer service? If I walked up to the counter at my local Best Buy and employed the Geek Squad to my cause, how different would that experience have been? In a world where I am feeling left constantly wanting for genuine customer service, who the hell was I to walk into this space and unleash my internal salvos of disdain based on my own preconceptions?

In the end, though I remain unconverted to the cause, I must admit that I see much more clearly now some of the reasons that a person might choose to transact their business in an Apple Store before anywhere else.

Comments

overloaded wrote:
Chumpy_McChump wrote:
overloaded wrote:

Oh, and citing your love of DOS commands as some kind of metric of computing hardcoreness? Please. Unix is older, deeper, more powerful, and more customizable than DOS has ever been, and if you strike it down, it will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Punk.

Are you really trying to out-oldschool by commenting on something that's less than 10 years old?

Besides, the mention of DOS was only an indication of followed scripture, not an e-peen measurement.

What's less than 10 years old, exactly?

OSX. Before that MacOS wasn't Unix-based.

Hans

hidannik wrote:
overloaded wrote:

What's less than 10 years old, exactly?

OSX. Before that MacOS wasn't Unix-based.

Time flies, and OS X version 10.0 is 10 and a half years old. (It was released March 24, 2001; the Public Beta goes back to September 2000.)

Because no one ever used Unix pre OSX.

(Or still uses. We're a PC household because we're pretty much all very hands-on types. Also, I can cobble together a PC on the epic cheap out of shoeboxes and stubbornness.)

I'm a PC guy, without a doubt, simply because I can build my own PC for a tiny of a fraction of the cost of an equivalent Mac. My current PC - which handily plays all the newest games at maximum settings - cost me $600 to build.

Customer support is meaningless for me, as I'm more than capable of dealing with any issues that arise.

My wife is an Apple fan, though, and I always recommend Apple products to the non-techy folks who can afford them. They do "Just Work", and do so well. They are good machines without a doubt, but they are ridiculously expensive for what you get.

My experience, honestly, is that the "Geniuses"... well... aren't. They're not as bad as the Best Buy "Geek Squad" who are outright appalling, but I've never seen one who was actually competent. Could just be bad luck on my part, though. They *DO* provide good customer service, though, and will generally just replace things that "don't work" (* note, in most cases, this means the user has $#@#ed them up and that they are in fact entirely fixable) - an outcome that's just as good to your average consumer.

And I'd always rather my friends and family just take their Apple product to the Apple Store, and have them do whatever than endlessly call me because their computer/phone/whatever "is broken" (Lets not get started on the horrors of family/friend tech support!)

Good for them, but I'm very glad that I don't have to pay that absurd premium for support I neither need nor want.

Wonderful article. Loved it. Even though I still want to burn down every Apple store I know of. You could replace everything "Apple" with "Nazi" as far as I'm concerned; I don't care how lovely and helpful and dedicated your religious nutjobs are, I'm not drinking any of their coolaid.

I was a Mac diehard fanboy in my youth. I mean diehard; I was on a Mac IIsi when my friends were playing Dark Forces on 486es, talking about Pentiums. Marathon and Avara for life, I say!

I bought MacFormat, I bought another magazine I can't remember the name of, which had monthly videos on their CD-Rom of PCs being destroyed in various ways. I was in, deep.

But that is a sh*tty f*cking place to be, man. To be indoctrinated in the sense that what you don't have is something you have to fight.

Now, having transitioned to PCs (because my Mac broke and getting a PC was like.. 5x cheaper, and I was a kid.. What do you do?), and being on the other side so to say, it drives me nuts to see Macs being treated as though they were the underdog, and have the underdog certificate of "you can talk sh*t about others now". There is no god damn underdog, it's just business. And as a developer, gamer and musician, I'll buy into the one that has known and acknowledged flaws but stays open, rather than the flawed, closed robot that sells itself as a perfect slice of heaven.

My parents use Macs, so does my sister. They should keep using Macs, because that's now their home town. But the notion that there is a "tipping point" where you switch over, because HEY ONE IS BETTER, f*ck offffff. I'll be fighting the Mac gospel every moment I can, because it's not about the reality of dedicated service, solid hardware and a well thought out OS (all true), it's about propaganda, disinformation and teaching a generation of consumers that it's silly to think.

It's the mcdonalds of computing, a sh*tty, overpriced, luxury mcdonalds, and I'm tapping OUT of that sh*t.

Sunjammer wrote:

Stuff

Meh, I could do with less drama here.

Sparhawk wrote:
Sunjammer wrote:

Stuff

Meh, I could do with less drama here.

But without drama I am nothing

I went through something similar, but then I caved. I was tired of being my own home system admin. I was tired of late nights fixing the guts of the computer. I wanted to move on from that and focus on the actual work that paid the bills.

The Apple stores are interesting because they're all at once condescending and futuristic. I would love to walk into Best Buy, point at a product and have someone walk up to me with an iPod and check me out right there in the aisle. No upselling or anything. Just a smooth transaction. I used to hate the Apple store because of the genius stuff. And I don't need their help, so there's that. But I've come to love how easy it is to buy stuff from them. I wish more stores operated that way.

Last night I purchased the iPhone 4S on an app on my iPhone 4. They think about the future.

I think it's possible to benefit from the ups and downs of both systems. I want my PC to be awesome and my own, built from the ground up by me, designed to do the things I want it to do. I buy the parts one at a time and assemble it myself.

I don't care that deeply about messing with the inner workings of my phone, so I bought an iphone.

Sunjammer wrote:
Sparhawk wrote:
Sunjammer wrote:

Stuff

Meh, I could do with less drama here.

But without drama I am nothing :-(

I said less, not no drama

Last week as I was packing for a business trip I hefted my 9lb. laptop, affectionately named Beth, short for behemoth, as in "my laptop is too heavy," into it's bag and paused for a moment of reflection. It had been a few weeks since I'd actually turned it on for anything. There's a PC on my desk at work, a Mac waiting on the podium at school, and I've only been interested in playing Gears or RAGE lately. I started wondering what it would really do for me on my trip. Was I going to pack another bag just to check email, surf the web, and watch Netflix? I decided maybe I would just use my iPhone.

But then I smacked into the wall on the opposite side. I still rock a 3G. Not even an "s"! And until my contract is up for renewal then it will stay that way. Updates to iOS and apps steadily reinforce the obsolescence of my phone. I started to seriously consider a tablet as a device to bridge the gap. Immediate access to the features I need on a trip and some amusing games for downtime. Thus began days of agonizing over online catalogs.

I had decided I would just give up and stick with my sore shoulder and slow phone when I went to a friend's for dinner and saw he had a new iPad. He told me about how he used it as his "everything" at school now. He runs his power point shows off it, keeps all his lesson plans there with a planning app and he also removed the piano from the choir room. If a student wants to hear something he can't sing he opens up a piano app. I was impressed.

Then he let me play Infinity Blade.

Posted from my iPad.

As a man who has built his own PC, and as a man who has a string of ex-girlfriends who loved their Apple laptops: I deeply appreciate this article. Détente indeed.

I haven't spent much time on Macs since they were called ]['s. I'm pretty egalitarian though. I'll use anything with current running through it. But recently I've had to move from being strictly PC to coding for the iOS. So I bought an iPad and a Mini and I'm learning.

I think you're lucky in your Apple Store people, though. The one nearest my house is full of oily salesmen and jerks who always seem to find some reason why what I need to do can't be done and treat me like I'm an idiot. The store manager is particularly bad. By the time I'm done with Captain Contrarian and his obnoxious talking wart (the little "Genius" who follows him around and bears a remarkable resemblence to the creepy little Greek chorus guy hanging off the bad guy's shoulder in Blue Dragon) I don't even want to see thing anymore. Only once have I made it out of the store with a solution.

I've finally stopped even talking to them and just go talk to our CEO, who is a huge Apple nut and so far hasn't steered me wrong about all those supposedly impossible things I keep trying to do before breakfast.