Overheard at the Apple Store

nice. i'm a big fan of the lenox store. they've been uber-helpful. but i'm not sure if our graphite ibook count as color, or grayscale?

I hate it even more when you're at a computer store and some sales person is telling someone something that is obviously wrong. While at a CompUSA (I know, I know), a guy was looking at a 8 port switch and a 4 port dsl/cable modem router thing. The switch was $80, the router was $200. The guy asked the sales person what the difference was. The guy examined both boxes, and replied 'oh. here it is, the router works with a mac'.

It's even more painful when you see such things at an Apple store. As is true with most Apple fans, I'm guessing, I want people to be able to take something home and have it actually WORK. I was at the SOHO Apple Store a few weeks ago, and the sales person was telling someone that he could plug his record player directly into his computer and record from it. Quite simply, that won't work very well.

Oh well. I guess that happens everywhere all the time every day. And, well, that's why they're a sales person at a computer store and not doing something more lucrative with their computer skills.

who needs a palm when you've got an eMate? :)

Hmm. Over the last few months I have digitized my record/vinyl/cassette collection using my G4 along with a $30 imic and a shareware application called sound studio. Ultimately it's all for the ipod, and for that it sounds great.

So typical. Trouble is when a salesperson tries to take advantage of the client's ignorance trying to sell him or her a more expensive option that might be too much for his needs when a simpler, lower priced one would do better. That's some interesting sales ethics issue.

I want an iMic so badly :P

well, maybe she ment the "color" imacs, the old ones. but yes, that's hilarious.

hope you had a great time at the apple store. i want to go to the nearst one to me, the kenwood apple store. i've been before, many times. went to the jaguar party and bought an ipod, and i just go to look. i need to take my ipod back to have it looked at. damn thing broke, but it still works all the same.

heh

It must have been Ellen Fleiss!

I thought she lived in California.

lol. even ellen fiess wouldn't be that stupid... you have to remember that she's a stoner, not a retard. (i think everyone has heard the story about ellen fiess...if not, watch this)

A smart sales person would have asked how old the computer is!?!

Seems like a silly question (asking what kind of Mac she has). If I recall correctly the Palm should work just fine with OS 8 onward.

Phew! Color, thank goodness! I'm having a hell of a time hooking the iPod up to the SE\30.

Seems like a silly question (asking what kind of Mac she has)

You need to know whether s/he has the right ports, if no USB (say, a beige Mac) then she won't be able to sync (and you'd have to tell them about cards, etc). Since that didn't work, the rep asks "what OS," this isn't a stupid question. It's not so much because the person was looking for compatibility (as suggested above) but the rep was trying to find something the customer would notice about the machine that would give him a hint. When you start up the Mac, the name of the OS (ie, Mac OS 9.2) is displayed prominently during start up. Something the customer might notice.

I don't think most people appreciate the amount of experience, thought, patience it takes for someone of high technical knowledge to try to translate a customer's needs (through often garbled tech-speak) into useful information so that a salesperson can help the person do what they want to do, and then translate back to lay-speak. It's why most computer salespersons are disliked. Most aren't any good and get holier-than-thou when someone doesn't know what a CD is.

Given how long Macs last, its possible this person had a Color Classic, and therefore saying "it's color" means something to them.

I brought my mac to the Apple store today and they did me a HUGE favor. I've been living with a boot problem for most of the time I've had it. I took it into Compusa while it was under warranty and they replaced the hard drive but it didn't fix it. I gave up and decided to just avoid shutting down. Last night, I installed a bigger, second hard drive and couldn't reboot using the arduous method I had developed to reboot whenever necessary. After trying various things and a new data ribbon, I brought it into the Apple store to have them look at it, telling them my saga, including that failed repair attempt. Thank goodness I included that part because Apple is going to fix it for FREE since the warranty service hadn't. He was quick to add that the actual policy is I have to complain about the repair within 3 months but they were making an exception (holiday spirit?). Radically different from the crappy treatment I got from Compusa when I simply asked for a system repair disk for a computer I bought on clearance. Isn't it illegal to sell a computer without the disks for the software that's installed on it??? Apple's tops in my book!