Genius Bar Help
Last week my son told me that the Mac Mini's keyboard wasn't working. It's the kid's computer, and it's used a lot by everyone in the house. It probably should be upgraded to a nice iMac, but that's a different story. I went to look at the machine and it was in major trouble. Light, Fan, but no start-up chime. Yikes. So today we took it to the Genius Bar at the Schaumburg Apple Store.
I knew the warranty was close - it'd been a year, give or take a bit, and just needed to get everything off the computer hoping it was not the hard drive. So I expected to pay - I just really needed it to be fixed. Knowing that this weekend was the launch of the iPhone, I decided to wait for Sunday and let all that excitement die down.
We made the Genius Bar appointment Saturday afternoon for 1:30 pm the next day. Good enough - we're in line.
We show up at 1:25 pm and we're #2 in line for the Mac services. Not bad. We have to wait a little while to have someone get around to us. I explain the problem, he checks it out with a monitor, keyboard, and power supply. The first test is that it's still not working, and it's not the power supply. That's some relief, anyway. Next, so takes it in the back to reseat the RAM. I've already done this and it didn't help, but I'm not going to get in his face about this, so I let him take his own path in the debugging cycle.
He comes back and that's not it. He looks at his laptop - which I'm guessing has the decision tree for debugging Mini problems, and then comes to the decision that it's the main logic board. This was one of the two things I had found would be the problem from my Googling - the other was the power supply, and we'd already ruled that out. So it's the logic board. Now what?
"Yeah, it's the logic board, and it's about a month out of warranty - but we're going to cover it for you. We have to order the replacement, it'll be here on Wednesday and it'll be a very fast replacement. We'll call you."
Simple as that, it's going to get fixed. I am completely overjoyed. I can't believe my luck. I'd heard that the guys working at the Genius Bar had a lot of leeway with the warranty work, and they didn't like people getting in their faces, so I had played it very cool for this reason. Now that it was looking like it was going to get fixed, it was dancing in the streets time. I could not believe it.
This experience, in addition to all the others I've had with Macs and Apple, in general, makes me a customer for life. I know there are some that have bad experiences... bad products... but I'm not one of them. I feel good every time I'm in that store. I know that just about anything I get will be top quality and will work wonderfully, and if it doesn't, the guys at the Genius Bar are going to give me a fair shake. You can't beat that.
So... all we have to do is wait for a couple of days for the call and then go pick it up. I'll make sure to pick up a big drive as well to make automated backups with. I'll put the same crontab I have on frosty on the Mini, squirt, so that the kids won't need to worry about losing anything should this happen again.