Yesterday KJG invited me to join her in a quest to buy a new computer. Or, more to the point, a Mac.
She’s had an iPhone for a while, likes it, and in the course of using it has grown accustomed to some of the Macinoid ways of doing things. Her laptop PC having arrived at its last legs (or whatever PCs have), she had pretty much decided she wanted to at least seriously consider a Mac.
So we presented ourselves at the Arrowhead Mall Apple store at 10:00 a.m., the moment it opened to the general public.
That was when we met the most amazing man. His name is Stan, and he and his yellow lab are employed full-time as sales reps for Apple computers. What a remarkable guy! He’s stone blind. Using Apple’s voice function plus an amazing tactile memory and about the quickest mind any of us have ever had the privilege to meet, he had no problem demonstrating how the various choices of products work, how they compare, and what the various choices (for example, of memory) mean in the context of the two businesses KJG and Mr. KJG operate.
The hound had recently had surgery and so spent most of his time resting. No matter. Stan had no problem navigating the store and all its products on his own, all the while operating as an engaging salesman.
He sold me a cool little Bluetooth keyboard tricked out as a cover for the iPad. It works like one of those expensive and useless little fold-up covers you can buy, in that it will put the iPad to sleep when you “close” it. But it gives you a small keyboard with actual keys that actually work, unlike the endlessly annoying virtual keyboard that pops up whenever you need to type something into an e-mail or a web page. This infuses enough usability into the iPad to make the gadget a practical device, something that I haven’t found to be true since I bought the thing.
And I learned that Pages, which only costs a few bucks and which now will manipulate Word documents, can be downloaded into an iPad as a fully functional app. So can Numbers, a spreadsheet with power comparable to Excel’s.
Hot dang!
I’ve wanted a spreadsheet app that would allow me to enter, say, a budgeted amount for Costco, so that I could carry the iPad into a store with me and keep a running tab of what I’ve spent. This would simplify life considerably. But the spreadsheet apps I’ve found so far leave a lot to be desired…like, say, usability.
The new keyboard gadget, Numbers, and Pages will hugely improve the iPad’s functionality. Too bad the thing doesn’t come already loaded with these things — it’s only taken, what? two years to figure this out.
KJG wanted some time to think about all she’d learned before deciding on a purchase, so from there we wandered to a shoe store — decided that the new Mephistos are surprisingly uncomfortable — and through several wonderful stores for teenyboppers and twenty-somethings (imagine! once we could wear stuff like that), and into a Coldwater Creek (this is what we have to wear now????), and over to the food court, and finally back to the Apple store.
Finally she decided on a 13-inch MacBook with a mid-range of memory. The staff there walked her through setting it up, and when last heard from, she was e-mailing messages from the little guy. 🙂
So that was fun. And productive, too.
another off-topic epistle: “The Case-Shiller index showed the improvement in home prices is broad based, as every market posted an increase for the second straight month. The biggest increases came in Phoenix, a market hit hard by the bursting of the housing bubble, where prices were 23% higher than a year earlier.” (from cnn)
That’s what we’re hearing. Even at that rate, though, home prices are not back up to what we paid in 2009 — when we thought prices were about to bottom out!
Aw, I *like* Coldwater Creek. 🙂 (My marketing profile skews a couple decades older than I am.)
Well, I like some of it, too. Like Talbot’s used to do, each season they cart out some new Big Idea…and this particular season, I don’t feel nuts about it. Lots of bling everywhere you look: sequins dropped like snowfall onto every shirt in the store!
Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration…but truly: it’s very glittery inside the store just this moment. To my eye, that’s the sort of thing my mother used to love: old-lady bling. There also were a lot of sort of resort-wear things in big splashy prints that holler “I’M RETIRED AND I DON’T HAVE TO WEAR BORING BUTTONED-DOWN UNCOMFORTABLE OFFICE STUFF ANNNNYYYY MORE!!!!”
On the other hand, we saw an incredibly awesome polyester top in a kimono style that looked exactly like fine-spun silk. It REALLY was pretty. Had a pretty price, too. On the sale rack, they had several of those very loose-knit shirts and wraps that you can put on over your cami and have the cami’s color show through without looking too, too risque. Prices on those were good…because, of course, they were on sale.
Yes, the sale rack is key. I can’t bring myself to pay retail, or even normal prices at the outlets near my folks where I usually run into Coldwater Creek. Haven’t been in since Thanksgiving, so I’ve missed the bling. I realized while sorting through my closet in the past year that as much as I love some of my finds from there — a coral, floral-patterned, ruffly tango skirt comes to mind, although I don’t see it in a quick pass of Google Image Search — I don’t have much occasion to wear them. The skirt was donated to the local thrift store. Still have gold ballet flats, though!
Sounds like an awesome Apple experience. Go Stan! Our Apple store used to be awesome, but has recently gone a bit downhill in terms of customer service.
You’ll have to keep us informed as to how you like Pages and Numbers. I have them both, but rarely use them actually. I’m a bit of an Excel junkie and find it frustrating to try and use a spreadsheet program via point and click. I prefer shortcut keys and navigating the entire spreadsheet without ever touching a mouse. So Numbers drives me batty. But it is nice to be able to open Excel spreadsheets I’ve made elsewhere and share then with people on the iPad.
It has to be said, Apple’s designers are more into pretty and kewl than they are into productivity. I do HATE pointing and clicking…so slow and so distracting. But many (if not most) of the Microsoft keyboard commands are system commands for the Mac! So you build macros to replicate them at your peril.
Yeah, the Apple store at the Biltmore seems to have slid a bit since the demise of Steve Jobs, too. But the one out in the lily-white suburbs, not so much…
Not so long ago I went with DD2 to “shop” for an Apple laptop for her to carry off to college. WOW what an experience…very knowledgeable staff that couldn’t be more helpful. The student discount along with the free printer DD rec’d was just icing on the cake! She LOVES her Apple and it has performed flawlessly. I used to think it was too much money BUT DD uses this thing ALL… the… time…school work….e-mails…entertainment,,,skyping. It is her constant companion.
Soon I will be in the market for a lap top but I am having trouble “pulling the trigger” for a $1500 Apple when I can get a HP with plenty of memory for my needs for a bit over $300. Is the Apple 4 to 5 times better than the HP….I’m not sure…Your thoughts?
Well, I don’t know that it’s 4 to 5 times better…it is just a computer, after all.
Because I’m not very techie, the service is huge. Dealing with, say, Best Buy is just a freaking nightmare; if you buy at Costco, you can at least return a lemon within a reasonable period, but you get zero tech support. Overall my memory of Dell and other tech support is pretty negative; once I had a couple of web dudes build me a computer and they were great, but they eventually went out of business. If you don’t use the Cloud, you don’t care about synching two or more devices, you’re clever enough to resolve most tech issues yourself, and you don’t mind having to clog and slow functionality with rafts of antivirus and other pop-up blocking software, an HP undoubtedly will do the job.
$1500 is a lot of bells and whistles. Consider that I got mine for <$1100 + 5% cash back on my Discover Card buying the newest refurbished MacBook Pro model available via the Apple Refurb Store online. It was a July model and I bought it in August. So 1 month old model. Same warranty and everything, just uglier packaging because someone bought it, opened it and returned it most likely.
My previous powerbook cost about $1300 (way back in 2005!) and lasted 7 years. Mr PoP's MacBook is over 6 years and still ticking for daily use. We pay a premium, but ease of use (I fight computers enough at work to want to do it when I get home) and the length of time they last seems to pay off in the end.
HTH!
Sucked in by a blind man, huh? 🙂 Hopefully he gets a nice paycheck for showing off their stuff in a way that few people can!
I understand pay for their floor sales clerks is extremely low, and they don’t get commissions. Apparently people love working there, but by and large they love it because they love things technical and like Apple products. Check this out: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Salaries-E1138.htm
$11.88 an hour…holy mackerel. Makes demolishing houses look pretty good, eh?
Funny, at least a few years ago the benefits (if you had enough hours to be FT) were quite good. Subsidized domestic partner insurance coverage, employee stock purchase plans, etc. And if you wanted to go career path it was an option. (I had a friend that worked there as a Trainer for a while.)
Domestic partner benefits: vast. La Maya and La Bethulia have been jacked around (back and forth, forth and back) as the Great Desert University decides one minute to cover partners and another to accommodate the Kookocarcy down at at the state capitol and cut hundreds of people off.
About 99 percent of the people you meet there act as though their morale were not in the sub-sub-basement. At GDU, the proportion is exactly the opposite.