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Faulty Apple Hardware Replaced at my Expense

27 March 2013 by

The WiFi button on my iPhone 4s greyed out after I upgraded to iOS 6.1.3., and I know from what I’ve seen online that I am not the only person to have experienced this.

I took an 8-hour round trip from the Isle of Arran to the Apple Store, Buchanan Street, Glasgow on Monday 25 March.

The Apple employee did a DFU restore on my iPhone 4S and that fixed it until I got off the ferry in Brodick. So I had to repeat the journey today (27 March) where I was told that I’d have to pay £139 for a replacement handset. I asked to see a manager. The manager admitted that it was a hardware fault, nevertheless I’d have to pay £139 for the replacement; no exceptions could be made.

I buy a lot of Apple products. My children have them, my wife has them and Apple gets money from me every week for apps, movies, music, games etc., not to mention the hardware. I recommend Apple hardware to customers of mine (I have a computer repair business on Arran) and have always felt like part of something great. Today’s experience of intransigence from the Apple Store manager has opened my eyes and I feel very upset, angry and disappointed at being made to pay for a replacement of a faulty product.

They have a chance to make it right before I end the relationship. It would be a shame to have to do that. Fingers crossed.

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Apple user gets hacked →

★
5 August 2012 by

This is a horrible story about a guy having his shit taken from him. He lost a year’s worth of photos. Think about that? [shudder]

But it wasn’t weak passwords or a poor password policy that let the hacker in. It was social engineering.

I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions.

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The iMac is here!

28 November 2007 by

I was waiting for a long time for the new iMacs to be released. That happened, but it seemed soon that Leopard would come out (the new operating system) so it would have been daft to jump into Tiger when I could wait just a little longer for Leopard. That happened a few weeks ago and I placed my order: a 24″ iMac 2.8 Extreme Edition. It arrived last Friday (took about six bloomin’ weeks mind) and came with Tiger installed but a Leopard disk. Just how long does it take for Apple to get Leopard pre-installed boxes shipping!

Anyway, it came and it’s nice. I upgraded to Leopard immediately and it’s now sat in our living room. Lorraine is finding the learning curve to be rather steep and I remember that from when I switched a year ago. Well, I say switched. What I really mean is that I bought a MacBook, installed Windows on it (in Parallels) and used OS X for pretty much nothing other than web browsing on Firefox (which I use on the PC also). So I never really got over the learning curve either.

It’s little things like getting used to using Command instead of Ctrl. The fact that many sites talk about an option key and they really mean the alt key. I try to delete stuff in the Finder using guess which key? Yep, the one that says “delete” on it, but it doesn’t work. I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie so it makes it harder for me I guess. Lorraine is more of a mouse gal and I thought it would be a little easier for her, but she’s having trouble too. Why does maximise not , well, maximise? I have to get used to bringing the cursor up to the top left instead of the top right for the close (although I’m getting used to Command W and Command Q now).

My wife’s main production tool is Word. It came with a nagware trial version of Mac:Word 2004. It’s troublesome. You can’t create a new folder in the Save As… dialogue box – that’s mind-numbingly frustrating. The non-breaking space and space characters are so small as to be virtually invisible (also VERY frustrating).

And iPhoto will NOT import my photos. Seemingly it’s a bug caused by the fact that my jpgs and raw files are all tagged with Lightroom. So the “it just works” thing failed on day 1 of having the iMac. And there’s no work around. How about that ladies and gentlemen?

So, all in all, it has been rather a negative experience. I want so much to like OS X. All those people can’t be wrong, surely? You know, the Mac evangelists. I do get sick of Windows XP trouble, but I’ve been using it for so long now that I pretty much can fix most things or at least know how to Google and where to look to troubleshoot. I’m rather in the dark with OS X though. However, I shall persevere (although saying that I’m actually sat in front of the iMac right now but typing this in a Remote Desktop window hooked up to my XP PC — hmmmm….)

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Mac ad spoof

16 April 2007 by

This is funny!

Apple Mac vs PC Spoof Ad Part 1 – Neo-fight.tv
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Displaying iTunes album art

18 December 2006 by

This has been bothering me for some time now, but it was one of those things that I just learned to live with. I’ve found in the past that it can be difficult to know what search term to enter into Google to find solutions for problems such as these.

So, what is the problem? I have a smart playlist that includes everything from my library, barring podcasts and audiobooks, that has a playcount of 0. As the tracks changed, the album art in the lower left-hand corner did not update. I would have to select iTunes and hit Ctrl L to select the track that was playing and have the album art update.

I decided today to try a quick search and entered this into Google: [itunes play shuffle album art doesn’t display].

That quickly led me to this post at macosxhints, whence I found another related post entitled
See album art for music in a shared iTunes library.

It says:

If you click on the top bar of the little album art window in the corner, and change it from “Selected Item” to “Now Playing”, you’ll be able to see artwork from the shared libraries as it plays. This has been working in iTunes for a few versions already, although it’s a bit hard to expose this functionality.

Here’s a screenshot showing the two options.


It’s just a small thing, but it had been annoying me for such a long time and it’s nice to have it finally resolved. Seemingly it will work with shared libraries too, although I haven’t tested that out yet.

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