Apple Genius bar, the last chance saloon for tech wannabe's

I have gone through 3 ipods in the last few months, the first was an upgrade to the 3rd gen and the other two were returned as faulty. One had a creaky screen and the other had an issue with the screen brightness.

I returned my previous iPods back to the place of purchase, Sainsbury's and received excellent service and a no-quibble replacement. But after having my latest iPod for only a week, I had determined that it was suffering from a bug that caused the darn thing to wake from sleep and start playing music after about 30 minutes. I put up with this for another week whilst trying to find a fix, hoping that it was a software issue, I did all the usual things, hard reset, software restore, new headphones etc... all to no avail. Maybe the latest patch would help? Sadly not.

By this time I was resigned to the fact that I would be returning this iPod to. I popped back to Sainsburys yesterday to the tune of "not you again!" Yes it is me, the guy who keeps buying faulty/flawed Apple products. to cut a long story short, Sainsburys were all out of iPod Touch's but offered a full refund. The iPod was purchased on my Debit card and it would take around 7 days for the money to go back onto this.

I could'nt bare to wait 7 days, so today I called Apple up and was told that an appointment had been made for me to see an Apple genius at 6:15pm in their Liverpool store. Oh what joy!

Apple Store Liverpool

I arrived at, 5:30pm to see if they could see me then, after all I purchased an iPod not a Ferrari. I don't need to sit down on a large stool and be patronised regarding technology. Well, they refused and basically said that they would not speak to me until my appointment! So I just kinda stood there, which was both amusing yet rather annoying.

6:15pm rolled around and my name was at the top of the screen! Woo hoo my turn with a genius is coming. How do Apple get away with calling these people 'Genius' surely it's irony, sarcasm, wishful thinking! who knows?

I proceeded to relay my tale of woe, but I knew from the very moment the guy responded with "Hmm I have not heard of that before" I was in for a painfully irritating few minutes. Aha! but check this out, I had printed the entire contents of a forum about this very issue from the Apple website.

His response was something like "forums are just forums, anyone can write on them". "Yeah, but this is from the Apple website" I proclaimed! I then tried to show him, that there were 6 pages, but he was completely dis-interested.

He ran some diagnostics on my iPod and suggested 'wait for it' a software restore, arrghhh! kill me, just kill me now please!! If you would please take a look at the forum, you would see that many many people have tried a software restore etc.. yet no fix. I have spent a week trying to solve this and believe me, it is not a software fault, it is hardware! I nearly fell of the stool at his response, he said "Yeah but software is tangible".

I paused for a moment, thinking did I understand this 'Genius' correctly? Software is tangible! Mmm I remember the very first day at uni (BSc Software Engineering) the first words out of my professors mouth were "Software is INTANGIBLE, you cannot touch it".

Your back in the room! "Thats not right" I snorted, "Software is not tangible". "yes it is" he replied, "how so?" I said, "because you can upgrade it" came the reply!

I proceeded to explain that software is intangible because you can't touch it etc... I think this kinda pissed him off and he said that, "We will exchange for you, but you will have to wait whilst we order in a new iPod because we are out of that model". Yeah right, I bet you are!

Ah well nevermind, on the way home I popped back into Sainsburys just to check if any iPods had come in yet. Yes they had! woo hoo, and there had been a £10 price reduction and they gave me a £25 iTunes voucher to! Now that is what I call customer service.

Moral of the story, go and buy your iPods at Sainsburys, and not the corporate cool of the beanbag moron store.