The end of the iMac saga.......................

So my new iMac arrived a few days ago. It was just as Apple had promised.... I really could not have asked for better service from a company than what Apple gave to me. I KNOW (from friends) that Dell, HP, or any other manufacturer wouldn't have done what Apple did for me.

My faith in Apple customer service is nothing but rock solid at this point, but it will take a few months before I decide if my faith in the iMac line is. But so far so good!!!

State of the iMac address......updated

Dear Jamie,

Thank you for contacting AppleCare.

I have located the sales order number of your product. You may check the
status of this order at
https://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/OrderStatus (in the
'Single order lookup' section). Simply enter this sales order number and the
shipping zip code. Once the product ships from Apple, this webpage will tell
you the carrier and the tracking number so that you can check the status of
the shipment.

The sales order number is: **********

If you have any questions regarding this process, please call me at
512-***-****. If I am unable to answer, please leave a message. I will call
you back within one business day to answer your questions. Please reference
your Case ID (********) at the beginning of your message.

Sincerely,
** *****
Corporate Customer Care Administration
*******@apple.com
512-***-****



Then from the Apple site:


Shipping Method
Overnight

Product / Part No.
Qty

IMAC 24/2.8/4GB/320GB/SD-USA
MB325LL/A


1

Ships: within 24 hours

State of the Mac address……………………………

When I last updated you on the status of my iMac I was waiting for an “engineer” at Apple to review the data collected from the logging application they sent me (cool concept I think). Once they have determined if it was indeed a hardware issue (making this the 3rd one in 6 months) they would issue a replacement iMac. I spoke with my customer relations contact (she was very nice and understanding during the whole ordeal..props to Apple), and then to her manager (someone even higher up..corporate customer relations). The “upper management” member had been shadowing the whole thing making sure due diligence was being done (another round of kudos to Apple). She was the one who made the final call on issuing a replacement.
My replacement will be the latest version of the iMac (new in a sealed box). Mine was I think 2.4Ghz with a front side bus running at 667mhz. The new one is a little step up. 2.8Ghz with a 800mhz front side bus. New keyboard, new Mighty(or not so)Mouse. But I have to wait for a call today from Apple sales to verify my shipping info and to make sure that I get the right iMac. Once they have that I’ll receive an email from FedEx that has my shipping label in it. I can then box up my old iMac, attach the prepaid FedEx labels and have them pick it up. Once FedEx scans the return package Apple with ship the replacement via FedEx’s Expedite service (which according to their website is a same day delivery). I don’t believe I’ll get the replacement same day though to be honest, especially with the Holiday coming up. I expect to be shipping mine back on Monday, and hopefully getting the new one on Wednesday, Friday at the latest….OK, lemme change that a bit. Depending on what day it ships out I could potentially get it on Thanksgiving. I guess fedEx’s Expedite service runs on ALL days…all 365 of them. Cool.


I’ll update about this whole thing one more time…and it’ll be from my NEW iMac.

Peace out.

The saga of the iMac………………………………………

Be forewarned! This post will probably drag on for a while. So if you don’t mind me wasting about ten minutes of your life…..read on.


I purchased a brand new shiny iMac in the last week of May. 24” 4GB of RAM..a real beauty!


Within about a month and a half it started to get kinda buggy. By buggy I mean it would feeze up when I was playing World of Warcraft (I also thought it smelled hot..too hot). I knew it had plenty of horsepower to be playing that game but I put up with it for about 4 days while I did some troubleshooting. Being relatively new to Macs (I’d owned a Mac Mini for about a year prior to the iMac but didn’t use it regularly) I just did what was recommended on the forums. I finally broke down and called Apple. They had me do the same things over again and decided I needed to take it to a service center.
So I called the local Apple service center in Lansing Capitol Macintosh (great people btw! http://www.capmac.net ) They got it in house and diagnosed it as a bad hard drive. It was replaced and all was well. Ok, all wasn’t well. Within about another month it started to exhibit the same issues as before, hot smell, freezing until finally it wouldn’t boot up. Called Apple, they said take it in, I said this is getting ridiculous, they agreed. Capitol Mac got it, diagnosed bad hard drive, got new hard drive installed and ran into troubles doing the OS install. They called me and said they were going to have to replace the logicboard! They got the logicboard in and everything installed fine. My machine was back home and running like a champ.
Cut to this past weekend. It’s now been about an month and a half since the last repair and my iMac is now messed up AGAIN!
I started having issues when I would wake the display from sleeping. It would take anywhere from 2-4 minutes for the machine to become responsive. I spent two hours on the phone with Apple last night and told them I have zero confidence in this machine now. I asked for them to replace it as I think I got a “bad Apple”. They sent me a diagnostic program that logs all activity and generates a report for them to analyze. I was told by a senior product specialist that once they look at this report they will make the call on whether or not they will replace my iMac. I was under the impression from talking with this rep. that they were very likely to replace it. For God’s sake I hope so! If they do I will no longer have any lingering doubts in my mind about who Apple is and what they think of their customers. But as of right now I am a pretty bummed fanboy.


Wish me luck as I should be hearing from them this afternoon.

The Ugly Side of Being a Switcher.............(for me)................

I was a Windows user for quite a while (actually the year Windows 95 came out to be exact). And I still use Windows everyday at work. But this past summer I decided to make "the switch". I already had a Mac mini that I'd "played" with for a year and a half or so but my primary machine was a custom built (by me) Windows box. This rig ran like a raped ape! Blazing fast,never crashed, and was on 24/7 for at least a year.
But alas I fell victim to the Apple hype machine. Sort of. I mean I have ALWAYS been a gui guy. I've had been a customer of the Stardock suite of products, I was always playing around with alternatives to the Windows Explorer shell (I spent a LOT of time playing with and using Litestep). So you can see I'm drawn to eye candy and we all know that Apple has plenty of that!

So this summer in a one week period of time I purchased a 24" iMac (for me) and a 15" Macbook Pro for my wife. BIG investment (as I pay cash for everything I buy)to undertake but I was ready and my wallet was equipped! So one month into my purchase my iMac started to lock up randomly and the only fix was to reboot. But after about a day and a half of that my machine just refused to boot past a blue screen(sounds Windowzy doesn't it?). I called Apple and they said that I needed to take it to an Apple authorized repair center. I drop it off and they call to tell me the hard drive is bad...no big deal...it happens. This was July. End of August it starts doing the same thing. Take it BACK to the repair center and they diagnose a bad hard drive AGAIN. I call them on the day it should be done and they say that they are having "more troubles". The next day I am told that the logicboard needs to be replace!! Good lord! A $2000 computer that has failed twice in just a few months?!

Again, it happens. But NOW as of two days ago my machine is now starting to get weird again. Not anything like before. It runs like a beast. BUT if I walk away and let the display shut off (power saving), when I come back it takes the machine about 2 minutes to get up to speed. It'll show the busy icon (beachball)and I can't open or close anything for the whole two minutes. Once I get past that point all is well.

I am stumped. And this is part of my switching agony. If this were Windows I would at least know where to start. The task manager would show me what process is hogging the resources, but the Apple Activity Monitor shows things that I am unsure of. So now I have the whole learning thing to do over. Spending hours Googling the items that show up in the Activity Monitor. What sucks about that is the fact that there are fewer Apple owners than Windows. So my search results are not as good as if I were searching for a Windows problem......Less documentation.

So tonight I get to go home and start killing apps one at a time to see if it is an app. Then I get to start disconnecting hard drives (I have three externals) to see if it is one of those.

Ok, enough venting!! I need to do some work.

BTW, I HAVE done all the "Apple" things that people recommend. Like repairing permissions (wtf is that? what does it do? I obviously have no *nix background)

A NON_Smoking related update........................

Brrrrr, it got pretty cold over the last 24 hrs. or so here in Michigan but that is expected this time of year. I guess the cold weather will get me into using my lighting set up for portrait work and also give me time to start learning to use my Mac a little better than I do now. I just wrote my FIRST Apple Script. It’s an Itunes monitor that pumps a Twitter update for each song I play!! But after looking at mine I realized that someone else already did this a while before me..Bummer. I’m getting ready to make an Automator action that fires up this script and gets it running every time I launch iTunes.

That’s it, nothing much to post today, haven’t smoked a cigarette today yet (damn, I DID end up talking about smoking)

Bad move..no, STUPID move!

Ok, so I HAD my iPod Touch jail broken for ages. Created my OWN theme for it for Summerboard, had COOLER apps than what you see at the App Store (for the most part) and it worked great.

Then I caved, I said ya know what? I'm gonna restore it and go "legit", PAY (lame eh?) for the 2.0 upgrade... BUY apps that were otherwise FREE before and in the process of doing all this...... Give up my super cool theme.

Bad move, I am so bummed now. I am now stuck waiting for either the Pwnage tool to be updated to support the 2.0.2 firmware, or maybe Ziphone to be updated to work. Bur for now? I am kinda P.O.d at myself for BUYING into the App Store hype...how gay.

Leopard and my cat got in a fight!

I have been an ardent supporter of the Apple operating system for a few years now. I am by no means some sort of OS X guru, nor am I a crazed Mac zealot. I am a died in the wool technophile, a gadget geek, a tech junkie. I would consider myself beyond the realm of the average user. I have built more than two dozen custom computers, created a variety of network solutions for more than a dozen customers, I have built more than 20 websites to date etc.. ad nauseam. The picture I am trying to paint here is that of someone who is technically competent and skilled. But Monday I ran into something that for me was a brick wall.

I was upgrading my Mac from Tiger (10.4.?) to Leopard (10.5) when I ran into a problem. At some point early in the upgrade my cat (ironic isn’t it?) decided to sit down on my keyboard. What happened at that point isn’t clear, but I am pretty sure he managed a few well placed keystrokes that cancelled the upgrade mid way through. I walked back into the living room in time to see my Mac rebooting. My initial thought was,”WOW! That was fast!” But at boot up I got a kernel panic. Not good. So I did what all Mac user do, I tried all the known keyboard shortcuts to get it to boot up (this involves various keys being held down during boot up). No luck! I trolled the forums, Googled till my fingers bled, and then finally had someone on a forum tell me that the “new” Apple keyboards (like the one I have) don’t register with the computer fast enough to allow the keyboard shortcuts to work at boot. Weird, you would think that Apple…the king of “it just makes sense” would have noticed such a big mistake in design! Luckily the same person who tipped me off about the keyboard issue also told me that I can use my Apple remote at boot up to perform the same function as the keyboard would have. Now THAT is the Apple I know….It is brilliant! So long story short, my Leopard upgrade was a PITA. I ended up doing a clean re-install of Tiger, then did the upgrade to Leopard.

So far I would say Leopard was worth the headache. It seems to run even FASTER than Tiger did! OS X is a beautiful OS…even if it is not the most user friendly upgrade when something goes wrong.

This is for all you *nix people out there….why no bios on OS X? Is it a *nix thing? Or an Apple thing?

.Mac Storage increase for Time Machine??

I just had a thought...a good thought. Could the increase in our .Mac accounts be because Apple (or Leopard really) is going to enable Time Machine to back up to our iDisk? Just a thought. Has anyone heard anything of the sort?

A change is on the way....................

In case you haven't been by my site in a while, it hasn't changed much in a long time. I think my last post was a month ago! So in an attempt to get back into maintaining my website I am switching it back over to an iWeb created site. I'll still have hosting provided by Godaddy, so we'll see if some of iWebs newer features will still work. I know the widgets ought to, but the new galleries might not. I guess the only way to find out is to just go for it! I'll hopefully be transitioned by Sunday night......hopefully!

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An update long overdue by Apple.................

Finally! I think I am gonna buy a new .Mac account soon and switch my site over to an iWeb site again. Now that Apple has gotten their shit together and offered up a "decent" amount of iDisk space, enough for me to host/save my photos on, i'll give em a shot again. I'm pretty interested in the new iMacs too, but that will be a long time coming. What do you think about the boost in space for the .Mac accounts?


Hmmmmm, I didn't even log in yet to see what all is new in .Mac..........bbl

Another Apple on the tree

Woot.

Droooooolz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Must........buy...............Must............buy..................Too bad it's a Cingular only deal. Damn you Steve!!! I may have to dump Verizon this summer once it's released. Once again Apple makes the killer product!