Kids,
When you buy something that isn't exactly cheap its probably a good idea to keep your receipts. On top of that, if it's big and awkwardly shaped enough that you might need 2 hands to carry it then keep the original packaging.
In my experience with electronics things will go wrong right away or not really at all. Believe me when I say that I almost pooped a chimpanzee today when I found a dead pixel on my monitor. While I don't suffer from any of those other problems with the 27" display, I was not pleased to discover that I had a Shakespeare style spot.
I promptly put on some pants and marched right back to the Apple store carrying the 30 pound monster through the falling snow and slush (remember what I said about boxes?).
So I walk up to the counter and the lady asks me if I have an appointment. WTF? I say no but proceed tell her about the problem. She says that since I don't have an appointment I'll have to wait for the next Genius to become available. How do they determine that? Well, you look at this stupid TV on the wall which scrolls through some advertisements and eventually (like 2 mins later) gets to a screen that shows current appointments and next available time slot...which would be in 2 hours. MANG.
Anyway, I worked some Emperor style magic and ended up getting some help right away.
Here's what Apple's return policy looks like. In short, you have 2 weeks to make exchanges or returns (which you may have to pay for) and anything outside of that you're pretty much screwed and have to deal with the machine you have now.
Like most other display manufacturers there's a tolerance for the minimum number of pixels that must be dead to warrant a repair. The Genius said it's about 5 for iMacs but I just have one. Right when I'm about to rip my shirt off and go Hulk all over the place, he says that since you only bought it a few days ago we'll just go ahead and exchange it for a new one. Sweet.
Talking to the guy a bit further, after 14 days this would definitely not be the case. Even if I paid the extra $199 for the Apple Care you can't get an exchange - you get the default 1 year warranty but the situation is the same. On a related note, here's a pro tip for shopping at Apple: if you know someone who is in school you can get an education discount if they buy stuff for you. At the way they're priced, every bit helps. It even applies to Apple extended care (which you have up to 1 year to buy).
Drama seems to be avoided (for now). I better put this thing through its paces for the next week before I hit that 2 week limit.
Say hello to Time Machine
Luckily one of the things I did after cleaning up the other iMac was re-install Snow Leopard, burn some old files and then get Time Machine running. Don't be fooled, there is no such thing as factory restore like Acer or Dell PCs have, so when you follow the instructions on How to factory restore my Mac, don't be surprised that it tells you to format your HD and then re-install OS X.
Now that I have a brand new computer, I wanted to get back all the stuff that I lost. Luckily OS X makes it relatively easy with Time Machine. Ever since the Great Fail-Format of 2009 I have some external hard drives lying around, so I dedicated one to Time Machine. So when we did the computer swap at the store I didn't have go through any trouble with the so called Apple Genius backing up any files that I wanted to keep so I just high-tailed it out of there.
Setting up Time Machine is pretty straight forward, you basically select which folders you want to exclude and then the program backs up everything else.
Time Machine keeps:
- Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
- Daily backups for the past month
- Weekly backups for all previous months
Mine's pretty much empty but the idea is you can scroll back and forth and see snapshots of days past and restore stuff from then if you want to.
That's enough for now. I think the score somehow became Apple: 1 - Emperor: 1
The plot thickens...but probably not.
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