Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I Love You Apple, Oh Yes I Dooo...

I had a Genius Bar appointment at 4:30. It was crowded, and people are idiots, and the people who work at the Apple Store are Zen Masters of Dealing with the Public. Oh, the things I saw and heard, even in the half hour I was there. The people who do this for a living are SAINTS.

"How come I'm using so much data?" from somebody who regularly used his phone as a wifi hotspot. We won't even get into the people who don't know how backing stuff up works. That was just in 30 minutes, in my immediate vicinity, in a very crowded store.

Still, I was done and out of the store by 5. With a new iPad, identical to my old one. Alas, it was not free, but it is still the 32GB and cellular and retina display I had before, and I paid (rather, my boss paid) $299. The iPad Air version is $729, and though I cheerfully agree when my son calls me an Apple Zombie, I am not quite such a zombie that I have to have the latest and greatest Everything Apple, nor would I have ever in a million years dreamed of asking that of my boss.

The Genius guy had no idea why the old one died. He looked at it, said, "It is immaculate!" and pulled up the serial number, established that it was far out of warranty. So when he said I could get a brand new one just like it for $299, I said, "Sold!" Boom. Done. I was outta there 10 minutes later.

I toyed with the idea of the iPad Mini, but really, the base model - 16 GB and wifi - is also $299. I had a full sized 32GB iPad with retina display and LTE, and I could replace it for the same price? No brainer. I had somehow managed to put 20GB of crap interesting things on the one I had when the display died, and I did use the LTE network now and then in a pinch - but not regularly, a small data plan works for me - so I wasn't keen on getting the newest, hottest thing if it meant giving up the storage I apparently need, and the option to use a cellular network in a pinch. So though I don't have the hottest and newest iPad, I again have what I had on Monday morning at 7:30, when the old one worked.

The boss had been prepared to spend more, so he'll be happy too. Win-win! Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go cuddle the new baby.






3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was hoping the old paperweight had some mysterious disease that would have them grabbing it and giving you another one, but still a good result.
That model costs about double here in OZ.

Give the new pet a cuddle from us,

Gae, in Callala Bay

Catherine said...

If you are still in warranty they do just hand you a new one, no questions asked. It happened to people on either side of me today. But mine was many months past even fudging the warranty date, though still immaculate, so a discounted replacement was the best they could do. I can't complain; it was fair.

Catherine said...

It took a little bit of fiddling (somehow, Apple had an old email address also associated with my account, and I had to figure out how to get past it to use my current Apple ID) but the new iPad is fully restored from iCloud, all my apps are back where they were, and everything works. And this is why I am an Apple Zombie. The stuff is just so easy to use.