They’ve made great strides towards redeeming themselves in my eyes.
Initially I had a pretty low opinion of the Tokyo Apple Store. They jipped me out of a copy of iLife ’04 back when I bought my iBook in January. Granted, they were still a far sight better than the incompetence I experienced from the Apple Store in Korea (this summer’s hard drive trauma), but still didn’t rate too highly in my book.
Until this week.
My iPod had been acting flaky for some time. It would never sync up with my iBook, and only connected to my iMac about 30% of the time. Fortunately, I was able to get all my music backed up off it, so there was no danger of losing any data. But it clearly needed help.
On Thursday I took it in to the Apple Store in Ginza, hoping they’d be able to fix it. It was still under warranty, so there was no worry of them trying to get more money out of me.
I made an appointment at the “Genius Bar” (how fucking pretentious is that?) and went off to kill time while I waited my turn. When my time came I sat down and explained the problem. My iPod synced up with the PowerBook the tech was using, but was still taking a long time to come back to life after he reset it. We tried my cable as well and had similar results. The guy ran a few tests and got it working okay, and that was cool.
Then he did something even cooler.
He noticed I had about a month left on the warranty, and I braced myself for the AppleCare sales pitch. Instead he says,
“Why don’t we go ahead and give you a new one?”
Okay, I’m thinking new new, but that wasn’t the case. They gave me a fresh (serviced and reconditioned, I’m guessing) iPod of the same model as mine – 3rd generation, 10GB.
How sweet is that?!?
Sure, being stepped up to a 20GB 4th gen. would’ve been awesome, but I don’t really have any room to complain here. This doesn’t completely earn back all the cool points they lost when they weaseled out of giving me a copy of iLife, but it’s a good start.
Now…if only they’d replace my keyboard with the disappearing letters….