My Journey to Macintosh

I was linked from the BBC web site this afternoon so hello and welcome to anyone who is visiting from there.

I had an e-mail from Darren Waters from the BBC this morning who had seen the photos on Flickr and asked if he could interview me about the faulty battery and my experience with getting it repaired, three hours later and its up on the BBC news site. Who said traditional journalism can’t keep up with the pace of blogs?

My original post about the bulging battery is here.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, applecare, bbc

Unlike Dave I’ve owned a Mac for nearly three years now and thought that I was fairly adept with OS X and knew most of its secrets. This evening though I found out that you never really stop learning.

There’s a shortcut in Safari and the Finder that allows you to navigate quickly up a directory or website hierarchy. Command+click on the folder name at the top of the Finder window or in the web page’s name at the top of a Safari window and you’re shown the path of the file / web page you’re at and can quickly navigate back upwards. If you’ve got a three button mouse plugged in then a middle click will have the same effect.

It makes me wonder what else I’ve still not found out about OS X.

By Eifion

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, guest author

A friend of mine recently came across something new and useful after almost three years of Mac use and wanted to share it with the world, so the next post will be by him and not me! This might happen again occasionally if inspiration strikes him, or if you feel you have something that would fit in with the content of this blog then please let me know and I am sure we can get it published.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, guest author

I really hope that the rumor of Apple adding a spreadsheet component to iWork is true.

I bought iWork fairly quickly after buying my Mac because I had to give a presentation on short notice, the iWork trial that came with the mac had expired and the price is right, being just under that invisible price limit that makes you think twice so I just plugged the credit card in and off I went.

I am glad I did as well, I think Keynote is a fabulous presentation app and Pages is perfectly adequate for writing small documents and to be honest I have been holding off buying Microsoft Office for my new business until I have to because I would rather not spend that money on software I will rarely use.

What it does desperately need though is a simple spreadsheet application much like ThinkSecret is describing:

[Charts is] a more consumer-friendly spreadsheet application that can handle the needs of home users and small businesses but not pretend to execute any of the more advanced functions of Excel.

I have my fingers crossed that it is true!

(… and I know, I could try Open Office or Neo Office, I just haven’t absolutely had to yet but I will before shelling out for MS Office :)

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, apple, iWork, charts, keynote, pages

So I had another encounter with AppleCare tonight and what a memorable one it was too!

I was trying to get my external microphone working with my MacBook Pro and failing miserably, I googled and found some articles about setting it up in System Preferences and also in the Audio MIDI Setup but nothing I did seemed to work so I figured I would use the AppleCare plan that I paid so much money for and ask a genius!

I got through to a guy on the phone and he didn’t have the slightest clue what he was doing, I had to tell him about the System Preferences with the audio input panel and suggested it might be something to do with that, at which point started to leaf through the manual in front of him, let out a big sigh and said…

“You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Windows PC, everything would just work”

Err… … …

I couldn’t stop myself laughing :) He obviously hasn’t been drinking the Kool-Aid about “Everything just working with a Mac”.

Now this guy obviously didn’t care about what he was doing in the slightest and just kept trying to get me off the phone, at one point I asked if there was anyone else I could speak to who knew slightly more about audio on the Mac and his best suggestion was to put the phone down and keep calling until I got through to someone who knew something.

Fabulous customer support, I only wish I had been taping it (I might have been if my microphone had worked!!! :) anyway I didn’t get it fixed and gave up in the end but the phone call wasn’t wasted because it did make me chuckle a lot ;) Sort it out Apple.

Update 1: Some comments are suggesting that I made this story up, I can not prove it of course but I assure you that it is true and not exaggerated. I have nothing to gain from making Apple look bad and I do not mention that they are worse than any of their competitors.

The thing with this is its a funny story and I wanted to share it! ALL call centers have pissed off people working for them and I certainly got on the phone with one of them tonight, I may have been unlucky but it is true…

P.S. I don’t actually think it was Bill who answered the phone tonight, unless he was putting on the accent of a bored british teenager ;)

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, applecare, sucky customer service