Apple’s Customer Service

The few times I’ve had to go into an Apple store for support on an iPhone or laptop, I’ve been blown away by the level of care I received and with the professionalism with which I was treated. Sure, customer service is an iffy situation, and your mileage may vary. However, Apple has topped customer service and satisfaction lists time and again, so I know I’m not the only one who’s been treated well.

This weekend, Apple had a new opportunity for customer service success or failure. Apparently, many new iPhone 3GS owners were unable to activate their phones. Some have been waiting in iPhone limbo for three days now, including a friend of mine. (My own 3GS activation was smooth as silk on Saturday, only taking 2 minutes.) Yesterday, Apple proactively reached out to those affected customers with the email below:

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for your recent Apple Store order. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience caused by the delay in your iPhone activation.

We are still resolving the issue that was encountered while activating your iPhone with AT&T. Unfortunately, due to system issues and continued high activation volumes, this could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete.

On Monday, you’ll receive an email from Apple with an iTunes Store credit in the amount of $30. We hope you will enjoy this gift and accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused.

Thank you for choosing Apple.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

The outage only impacted a small number of users, but Apple didn’t wait for this “outrage” to hit the Monday headlines. They stepped up, owned their failure for these customers, and honestly apologized for letting them down. That attitude is relatively new to the company who’s known among haters as being “snobby, arrogant, and smug.”

Good for you, Apple. As consumers, we don’t really mind failure. We just don’t like lies and coverups when failure happens.

More at CNET.

New G.I. Joe Movie Trailer

Okay, clearly, this movie is not going to win any Oscars this year. However, I am really looking forward to seeing G.I. Joe this summer. It is an awesome summer to be a geek in his mid-thirties. Why? Because the two best toons from 25 years ago, G.I. Joe and Transformers, both have movies coming out. Good times.

The new Joe trailer is on YouTube, but they’ve disabled embedding. You can check it out on YouTubes’ site: GO JOE!

iPhone Mania!

Time for another Apple fanboy confession. This past Monday, I put myself in a total news blackout as I do on the day of every Apple keynote address. I lock myself away in my office all day, change my IM status to “Media Blackout–Don’t Tell Me About Apple Announcements,” and walk quickly through the halls trying to avoid any geeky conversations. Why? It’s because I like to watch the video of the keynote address later that night, after Apple posts it online, with the wide-eyed wonder of the blissfully uninformed.

I love watching the Apple keynotes unfold. Since I’m not into sports, this is my Super Bowl. You wouldn’t want to watch the big game after you find out the outcome, right? That’s why I never want to know the Apple keynote news early. I’d rather watch it fresh myself.

So this week, I watched the keynote and got the low-down on what Apple wants me to spend my money on this year.

As an added bonus, the geeky baby watched it with me. We kicked back at my

Geeky dad and baby bonding over the Apple keynote.

desk and watched the video on my computer while the geeky mom laughed at us. Silly Maryalice. Abby and I know what we’re doing. This is important stuff, and prime father-daughter bonding!

As expected, they unveiled the new iPhone, a modest, yet somewhat significant upgrade to the iPhone 3G that was sitting on my desk beside me. I went to bed that night impressed with the new feature set, but not convinced it would be worth the money.

The most compelling upgrade for me, as a new geeky dad, was the improved camera with auto-focus and, of course, video. Having a decent video camera on me wherever I go is a big selling point, especially with a four-month-old daughter who’s starting to do revolutionarily cool things every day. But was that alone worth the cash?

Yes. But only if I could do it within my own stringent financial requirements.

The next day, my current iPhone 3G found itelf unexpectedly posted on Craigslist. The asking price was $430, which surprisingly was a pretty competitive price for a like-new iPhone with no pesky AT&T contract requirement. I had four offers within the hour, another five or so by 4:00pm, and $420 cash in hand by 8:00pm. Though I didn’t intend to do so when I woke up Tuesday morning, I sold my beloved iPhone. Not to worry, though. The iPhone 3Gs (the new model) was ordered and scheduled for delivery before I went to bed.

So, in all, I sold my current model for $420 and bought the new one with a cool new featureset for $435. Not a bad upgrade for $15, huh?

New Fitness Site and Podcast!

I’m excited to announce the launch of my new coaching site and P90X Daily Coachcast podcast!

The Daily Coachcast podcast is a 90-day podcast series that walks people step by step through their 90-day P90X fitness transformation. In a short 3-4 minute episode a day, I’ll share tips on workout form, technique, diet, scheduling, and other crucial areas that impact your success with P90X. The podcast is available through the iTunes store (for free) or through the links at www.dailycoachcast.com.

The Daily Coachcast website offers additional information on all of Beachbody’s fitness programs and supplements, as well as information on exclusive discounts on all of Beachbody’s products.

If you’re curious about P90X or any of Beachbody’s other great programs, or if you’re already “pushing play” with Tony Horton every day, you definitely need to check out the Daily Coachcast! I’ll see you there!

Abby Month 3 Pics!

I know, I know … Better late than never. Here are the month 3 pics we took of Abby a few weeks ago. I can’t believe how much she’s changed even since these pictures were taken! I’ll do a better job with the month 4 pics in a week or two!

Click the cutie below to go straight to the gallery!

Microsoft’s New “Natal” XBox 360 Project

Though it may be hard to believe, I actually love it when Microsoft announces something extremely cool. Competition is a very good thing for everyone, Microsofties and Apple fanboys alike.

Take a look at this sneak peak of MS’s “natal” project for the 360. Very cool. I just hope it works.

Entourage Must Die

Okay, let’s be honest. I’m a Mac guy. I love Apple products, Apple software, and the Apple way of life. I make no excuses about that. That said, we’ve just go to deal with the gigantic pile of suck named Entourage.

If you don’t know, Entourage is essentially the Mac version of Microsoft Outlook. It comes with the Mac version of Office, along with Word and Excel. For some reason, Microsoft chose not to simply port Outlook over to OS X, much like they’ve done with the other Office programs. Instead, they started over and did their best to totally deconstruct a wonderful PC program, Outlook, and turn it into a useless, buggy, unreliable monstrosity named Entourage. What garbage.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been stuck on Entourage at work because our Exchange server won’t sync my calendar with any other Mac program. That also means I’ve been depending on Entourage for my email. There’s the problem.

Without going into the laundry list of problems, let me just focus on the main one: Entourage doesn’t want me to send some messages. At least once a week, as I’m typing an email, the entire message window closes. Poof. It just disappears. The message doesn’t get sent, it isn’t saved as a draft, it isn’t moved anywhere; it’s just gone. Forever.

What’s worse, it always, ALWAYS happens when I’m in the middle of a long, important, sensitive, and carefully crafted message, often addressed to my boss or other leaders of my company. When it happened yesterday, I threw in the towel. Entourage must die.

I’m locked into it for my calendar, but I have email options. I tried both Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird throughout the day and decided on Mail. It’s nice and clean, super fast, and simple. By simple, I don’t mean weak; I just mean that it does one thing, and it apparently does it very well. I like that in an app. Entourage, on the other hand, chose to go the other direction. It does a thousand different things, and does them all poorly.

Apple Mail is not without its problems. There are some extremely elementary things that it should do, but doesn’t.  For example, the preview pane is at the bottom, with no option to move it to the side. Really? I’m sorry, is it 1996? Am I using this program on a 15″ CRT monitor? No. I’m using it on a dual monitor setup based on a 20″ widescreen iMac. I’ve got enough screen real estate. Let me put the preview pane on the right side like every other modern email program, won’t you? At least I solved this one with a third-party add-on, WideMail. This awesome plugin also allowed me to set my inbox message list exactly like I had it on Entourage (which I liked). See the side-by-side below.

Apple Mail vs. Entourage Message List

Also annoying is the way it handles image and PDF attachments. Attachment isn’t even the right word, since you can’t really “attach” image files. Instead, Mail inserts the images inline in the message body, regardless of size, orientation, or anything else. Worse, it does the same thing with PDF documents. I’m sorry, I’m not a four-year-old-girl trying to figure out how to email a picture to my grandmommy. I’m a professional who has to email image files and PDF docs to other professionals, and sometimes to automated systems that don’t recognize embedded PDFs. Epic fail. Again, fixed with a third-party application.

And last, the most annoying of all is the one that, I must admit, is most characteristic of Apple. If you’re using the preview pane, there is no way under the sun to prevent Mail from marking a message as “read” if you’ve clicked on it. How ridiculous. Even I have to admit that choosing to not do the simplest thing, despite the fact that every other email program on earth does it, is a total Apple move. This one is killing me. Even if I sneak a peek at a message in the preview pane, I still like to keep messages marked as unread in the message list if I want to come back to them later. Having them all appear as read is a joke.

So, there’s my email rant of the year. Entourage stinks, Thunderbird failed out of the gate, and Apple Mail is workable, but comes up short on the most basic things. I hate to admit it, but finding a quality email client is the one part of the Apple lifestyle that I find hard to defend to the naysayers. It just makes me glad I use Gmail for my personal stuff.

Favorite Search Term of the Week

Occasionally I like to peel back the curtain and show you all my favorite search term that someone used to find my site for the week. Today, I present the unabashed honesty of a fellow geek who knows how to use Google to find what he wants.

For the record, my geeky friend, I love my AppleTV, but if I were starting from scratch with a wide-open budget, I’d make a media center out of a Mac Mini.

Could This “Internet” Really Deliver the News?

This is fabulous. It’s a local San Francisco news story about how this newfangled “internet system of computers” might one day deliver the daily news. Could such a thing ever really be feasible?

Best part: it took two hours to deliver the text edition of the paper by phone modem at an hourly data rate of five bucks per hour. I’m not too sure this “internet” has much of a future. “Imagine if you will” indeed.

Abby Laughing on Video!

Abby’s been laughing off and on for a couple of days, but today’s the first day I’ve been able to capture it on video! I can’t believe how much she’s changing and growing every day!

Update: I added this video to our online gallery for those proud grandfolks, aunts, and uncles that want to download it.