Apple's Genius Bar is anything but

Sam Varghese
Monday, 27 June 2011 11:06

Opinion and Analysis

Devices purchased from Apple are a delight to behold. There's one catch though: there should be no hardware glitches.

If there are, and one is forced to get these redressed by the Apple bureaucracy, then the whole experience of owning a device from this company turns into a nightmare. At times like these, Apple looks like any other fly-by-night vendor - a mass of computerised inefficiency. And one with scant regard for its customers.

Last year, my son requested me to get him an iMac; as usual, such requests from the youngest member of the family are honoured. Since then the 21.5-inch device has been sitting on his desk and has been utilised mostly to play Starcraft II, a popular game among kids his age.

The iMac costs a packet compared to an equivalent PC that would permit one to play this game. Cost, as I found out, does not always equate to quality. The machine has an i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM on board.

A couple of months back, it started showing signs of slowing down. The cursor would change into a spinning beachball at random; as time went on, this began to happen even when a single application was being used. The disk access would increase like crazy.

Apple's disk utility was then used to fix up broken symlinks but that made no difference. The company provides a more complete hardware test utility on one of the DVDs supplied with the computer but that test refused to run to completion.

As there was a month and a bit remaining on the warranty, I decided that it would be prudent to take it back to the Apple Store in the suburb where I reside.

CONTINUED