For those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may have heard bits and pieces of this already.  For the rest of you, I thought since we have voting and discussing if I should get Mac or PC, that I should update you on the situation.

After all the discussion, even though Mac “won” in the voting, I decided to get a PC (it seemed to make smarter business sense). So I went to Dell’s site since I am happy with my laptop, and was overwhelmed.  You may remember my “KISS” post about keeping things simple. Dell had too many choices.  Plus I did not want Vista (and the New Windows 7 is coming soon).  I was told though to update to it – you basically wipe your computer clean.  No thanks. So I was torn.  But decided to take a trip to the Apple store.

Yep, fell in love at the Apple store… Regretting that whole “love at 1st site” thing now…

So a few days later I decide I want the best most powerful Mac, a Mac that can grown and expand with my business.  Enter MacPro…  Beautiful, heavy, fast, best you can buy (well supposedly anyway).  A friend of mine from college works at Apple and got me a light discount – which was great.  So it was ordered through online channels (regretting that now too as the online and the stores are apparently two divisions that do not work so cohesively). No big deal unless you have issues.  More on that later…

The day the 53 pounder arrived, I had Fed Ex put it in my trunk, and I drove right to the Apple store at 12 Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan.  They took my laptop and the tower and migrated the data.  In 24 hours I was ready to go…  Well I was supposed to be ready to go…  I got to the store to pick it up.  They put all 38,000 photos from my PC into iPhoto.  I organized my content in a folder structure so this was a NIGHTMARE.  Also the calendar did not migrate correctly.  After using Mobile Me we figured out a way to fix the calendar.  My iPhone data did get messed up – but that was not too bad of a fix.  So, I left my computer overnight at Apple again and they deleted the photos from iPhoto and re-imported them back in.

All better, ready to go…  NEC sent me a demo model to test (before I buy) of the Multisync 2690.  So I hooked it up and got to work setting up and installing programs (like Photoshop for Mac) and getting VMware, Windows and old Photoshop versions on that side.

After 4-5 days or so, I was excited and ready to actually use the computer in production and for work.  I tossed my PC laptop aside and started playing and customizing Photoshop.  I did not really notice a huge speed difference – but I also was still getting use to finding the new keys and learning new shortcuts, so that may be why.

Then Wednesday night – not even a week after bring the Apple home from the data migration – trouble really started.  I could not get the computer to print. So I finished editing.  Quit all the programs.  Then clicked Restart.

What you see above I saw for about 15 hours straight. Apple Care was closed.  I cannot believe they are not 24 hours, but this is my fault for not checking before buying.  I had a few people from Facebook and Twitter recommending things and my sister and brother-in-law helping me try everything Apple recommends.  To no avail, the computer and hard drives would not re-boot.

I talked to Apple as soon as they opened. They had to repeat everything I had done the prior evening. Nothing…  Then play CD to do an archive and reinstall of the OS, which should save data but would probably wipe out programs.  It failed.  I got a big error after 5 minutes saying it could NOT install the OS.

Now what? I called the Apple store and immediately spoke to the manager. She was great and said to bring the 53 pound paperweight in for repair.

So now I have no Mac. It has multiple things wrong with it – not sure of all of them yet. The optical drive is not functioning correctly.  They are not sure but think there might be hard drive failure, and that the operating system is corrupted and needs to be reinstalled. All this under one week.  WOW!!! 

They called to tell me that before they can do anything they need to order a new optical drive and then can troubleshoot more.  It could easily be a week before my Mac gets back here.  Who knows…  But the troubling part is that the manager and the “genius” both said, they could have just given me a new Mac Pro if I had not ordered a customized one online.  They explained how they are two different divisions.  If you buy from one you cannot return to the other.  Even with this extreme circumstance there is NO WAY they can get me a replacement since it was an online purchase.  They said I can call customer service and try to get them to exchange it but then I need to do all the transactions, shipping, etc.  I seriously thought better of Apple.

If you got this far, and I am in shock if you did, I am just trying to appreciate that I have my Dell Precision laptop to type and communicate on.  And I am dreading trying to re-set up and combine data from my PC and Mac again.  Even if they restore it – certain things will be lost, plus all the data on the PC that I create this week will either need to be lost of moved.  I hate stress and try to minimize it in my life.  I am hoping that someday this will all be a bad dream and that I will be “in love” with my Mac as so many of you are. Getting off to a rocky start in a relationship will certainly make this harder.

For now I can only assume that I got a LEMON instead of an APPLE.

Now I need to take this lemon and sell some “lemonade.” Anyone thirsty?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Announcements, MCP Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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