Now I understand manufacturing defects happen particularly when you overcharge for something and maximize those profits by making your products in a Chinese sweat shop.  Customer service isn’t about how you treat the customer before the sale, it’s how you treat them when something goes wrong.  Using that as our measuring stick Apple failed miserably.  I first went to the AT&T store in Lone Tree at Lincoln and Yosemite by Target.  I bought the phone here and this would be my third visit.  The sales associate took one look at it and said it was broken and that he’d happily replace it but they had none in stock.  Understandable, it is rather popular.  I decided to try the Apple store at Park Meadows Mall.

When you get the the Apple store on a Sunday it’s packed.  You would think Apple were the biggest retailer of computers and gadgets on the planet judging by the number of people here.  They’re not, not even close but they do make some cool stuff and some horribly over hyped crap.  So I speak with someone at Apple and she looks at the phone.  She inspects it like a doctor using the same thing he’d use to look up my nose.  She takes it into the back and confirms two things; there is no water damage and it is broken.  Great, let’s swap it out and I’ll be on my way!  She then proceeds to tell me I’ll need a “genius” appointment and gets me set up on the iMac behind me to schedule one.

I’m starting to fume.  It’s a simple replacement, take one off the shelf, put my sim in it, and send me packing.  No, I have to make an appointment and the earliest is two days away on Tuesday.  At 6 foot 7 inches and about 250 pounds I can be a very intimidating person but rarely do I get angry.  I’m very understanding almost to a fault.  My wife doesn’t like how much it takes to get me actually mad.  I was ready to toss people through walls.  All I wanted was a working phone.  Two days I’d have to wait without my iPhone which in a week, had become the single most important device I owned.

So Tuesday finally rolls around.  I can only describe it as the longest wait since Christmas when I was a kid.  It didn’t seem like it would ever get here.  I get to the store they’re running 5-10 minutes late which just adds to my frustration.  Once I finally get to the “genius” he takes one look at it and says it’s broken.  He said they don’t have replacement screens so he’ll just replace it.  Between his “analysis”, the paperwork and print out, signing things, and swapping it the process was about seven minutes.  Seven minutes is all it took to make me happy but at the same time it’s all it took to prove that overpaying for your computer and gadgets to Apple may not be all it’s cracked up to me.

I get the sex appeal of Apple, it’s undeniable.  There is an outrageous price premium that comes with that though even though Apple has lowered their prices to more modest levels.  Apple should have the best customer service in the industry, after all what are you paying for?  It’s the same cheap Chinese parts in their computers as in Dell regardless of what Mac fans will have you believe.  As a software developer I find the Unix underpinnings appealing but I can get a Dell and Ubuntu and have Linux under the hood and I find it more usable than the very dated Mac OS X.  If this is their customer service why not go cheap.  At least if it were a Dell I could have called up and had them send me a replacement and sent the defective item back.  The process would have been about the same and I would have felt like the wheels were moving.  Instead Apple messed up and made such a simple task infinitely more complicated.

For the record I own an iMac, a Dell machine with Ubuntu, a Windows Dell laptop, an Asus netbook with Windows and Ubuntu (always in Ubuntu), and a smattering of other laptops and desktops.  I’ll say this, the iMac is nice but it’s not much different from Windows and Ubuntu.  It’s another tool at my disposal to solving problems.

Speed
It’s pretty quick I’ll be honest.  I have no issues with the performance for basic tasks.  Obviously I’m not running SharePoint or SQL Enterprise on here.  It’s for surfing the web, emails, IMs and whatnot.  The Intel Atom processor isn’t bad at all.  The one gig of RAM isn’t too bad either but I’ll upgrade it to two as Crucial has the chip for like $25.

OS
It had Windows XP Home on it which won’t work on the  Crowd Rent domain controller.  I had to bum a USB CD/DVD drive off a coworker since it doesn’t come with one and Windows is pretty tricky to install from a USB drive unlike Linux.  I partitioned the 160 gig drive into 100 gigs for Windows and 60 gigs for Ubuntu 8.10.  You need to use Windows XP SP2 to get it going.  Original XP and SP1 don’t have the right PCI Express drivers and cause a blue screen.  XP SP3 wouldn’t load into memory after bootstrapping from the install CD.  Make sure you have the LAN and VGA drivers on a USB stick but otherwise it was just like any XP install.

I’m planning on Ubuntu Linux on the other 60 gigs for the simple fact that I like it.  I want to be able to do Crowd Rent updates and fixes from the netbook even though I can do them in Windows.  I’m not sure how the drivers will work but my hope is smoothly.  I’ll get Netbeans 6.5 up and running in Linux and Windows as well.  Netbeans by the way is my personal favorite Rails IDE.

The built in video works like a champ which will be great for Skype.  It’s great to have this little guy on the couch, in the car on road trips, or on the beach in Mexico on the next vacation.  I can copy pictures off the camera, with internet access post them for friends and family too.  If there are issues with  Crowd Rent I can get to it, modify and upload code, and respond to our customers.  Remember, customer service is our goal and we respond as quickly as possible and a live human always responds.

All in all, the Asus  Eee PC 1000h netbook is fantastic.  I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a netbook.  I was considering the Dell as they preload Linux as a choice but the tiny SSD hard drive was just a deal breaker and it was way more expensive.  The Asus is a great bargain.

After going back to school at Colorado State University to get my Masters of Computer Science I was reunited with Linux.  I used it heavily in my Parallel Programming class where we did OpenMP and MPI development on government supercomputers.  With Crowd Rent up and running I do enjoy working with Linux as a server.  Tailing log files, updating via FTP, and managing MySQL via command line aren’t so bad.  I can SSH into my production servers from my BlackBerry and fix issues on the tiny screen.  Or tail the log files on my 24″ monitor all day long.  I do have to admit, I think I want a Mac Book to develop on now.

So to sum it up, via the transative property, you can see the Open Source software powers local rentals.  It’s fun to be a geek sometimes.