Apple – Great Products, But Pray They Don’t Go Wrong…
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SEE UPDATE BELOW…
As those of you that read Dr Gadget just may have picked up by now I’m something of an Apple fanboy. I switched to Mac November 2004 and since then we have had 3 iMac’s, an iBook, 2 white MacBooks and a MacBook Pro. This is not to mention the umpteen iPods, the three iPhones and the AppleTV. Our house is a veritable shrine to Apple. In addition I have been a keen evangelist for Apple and have converted many friends and family resulting in tens of thousands of dollars more sales.
Early in 2005 the logic board (Mac’s name for the motherboard) failed on my home iMac and it took a month to get repaired. Whilst this was a nuisance, I had an iBook for work and so it did not impact me there. Last year, however, as laptop performance converged with desktop I decided to consolidate on to one machine and for the first time invested heavily in a MacBook Pro. The machine cost nearly $5000 – and I took out the Applecare warranty for an additional sum in excess of $500 – to me a small fortune. My belief was that this is a business level machine and that the Applecare plan would ensure prompt service if I had any issues.
On Monday night my Mac died – refusing to boot at all. I was not unduly concerned having a Time Machine backup with all of my data for the last three months. Additionally we have some family friends who run an Apple Certified service business and who I knew would do their best to speed up any fix.
I was mortified today to receive a phone call from them to let me know that problem was again the logic board and that Apple were out of stock and would not be receiving new stock until the 10th of October. This meant that with the best will in the world I would not be getting back my machine until somewhere near the 15th… three more weeks of running the Aspen IT and web infrastructure with a Lenovo netbook – ouch.
Aghast I called Apple Customer Support and after being transferred around the world three times a very nice young man assured me he would try and speed things up and would call me back in a day or two. I do feel a bit sorry for these call centre folks – he copped a real tongue lashing from me. I put my case that when paying through the nose for a professional machine – and extra for the warranty – Apple had a responsibility to hold stock of spare parts. Do they anticipate that customer’s can keep a spare $5000 computer in case their main machine breaks down?
So I don’t know what will happen next. I have ordered a Dell laptop with better specifications that my Mac for about a quarter of the price. It even includes a free upgrade to Windows 7!! Perhaps the time has come to switch back?
UPDATE: Well I guess I had better stop complaining about Apple now. I received a call from Apple Customer Service and they are replacing my Macbook Pro with a brand new machine. They took on board my comments and accepted my position and did the right thing. Way to go Apple!
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-09-21
- http://bit.ly/4C1f4E The new Zune HD – I wonder if this one will make it to Australia? #
- http://bit.ly/11aEEn Google adds traffic to Google Mapsin major Australian cities. Major roads only, quite a few gaps – but still great! #
- http://bit.ly/fCjWw Lifehacker – top underhyped web apps of 2009. #
- http://aviary.com/ For simple image editing tasks you can't beat Aviary. #
- http://www.pdftoword.com/ Convert PDF to Word files – free! #
HD Nation – Hanging Your HD TV.
Hanging An HDTV: It’s All About The Studs. Telecine, Prints And Ugly Blu-Ray Transfers, Top 5 Movies from Comics, Blu-Ray releases for the week of September 15th, 2009.
Livescribe Pulse 2Gb Smartpen
- Image by Becca Taylor via Flickr
For those of you that are avid readers of this column it should have become obvious that whilst I am a committed computer geek – I also have a love of fine pens, paper and writing instruments. In this months column I have managed to combine both – and find a tool that is invaluable to doctors, especially when studying or at a conference. The device in question is the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen. Physically it is a slightly chunky ball pen – but this pen will digitise everything you write and save it to a desktop application. An addon called MyScript then does a reasonable job of converting it to typed text.
Alone this would be quite impressive – but this pen can also record the ambient audio at the same time – and link it to your written notes. Excellent for conferences, lectures and meetings. On the desktop the whole becomes searchable – and it seems to use the audio and text together to make the search quite accurate. Even better – you can return to your printed notes and tap on any word with the pen and it will play the audio from that point in the meeting.
The secret behind all of this is the use of special paper which is covered in microdots to form a unique map the size of Europe and Asia combined. This means you have to use special notebooks – but they are reasonably priced. If you have access to a laser printer the Windows desktop software allows you to print your own paper. The Mac software works well but so far lacks some of the features available to Windows users.
The 2GB pen holds about 200 hours of audio and is available from Officeworks or smartpen.com.au for $329 - smartpen.com.au has the wider range of accessories. More information at livescribe.com.
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- My new favorite gadget: Livescribe Pulse pen (jamesfallows.theatlantic.com)
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