The Macbook still is running amok, though the ancient iMac seems to be working fine.
I’m told my Apple ID password has been “updated.” I did NOT reset it. If it’s been changed, I have no idea what it has been changed to.
I’m still getting into DropBox and iCloud. But…
Incoming emails are going into the “Archive” folder. Sent emails appear to go out as multiple copies — in one case, 15 or 16 of them! — though it’s unclear whether more than one copy reaches a recipient. Asked one recipient if he had received a pile of copies, and he said he did not.
Messages that I’ve sent to others are landing in “Archive,” too.
So…I retrench by going over to Funny about Money’s G-mail account. Some messages do seem to be getting through. At least one ended up in The Copyeditor’s Desk’s G-mail account — and no, I did not misaddress it.
Sent messages show up in MacMail’s “Archive” folder, not in “Sent.”
An email sent from the Funny about Money G-mail account arrived with a return address for The Copyeditor’s Desk. No, I did not send it from the CED G-mail account.
An email sent from the Funny about Money gmail account arrives in “Archive.” It does not appear in “Inbox.”
An email sent to myself from MacMail lands in the “Junk” folder. MacMail will not let me mark it “not junk.” Manually moving it out of “Junk” to inbox causes it to jump back into “Junk.”
Nothing I do seems to fix any of these problems. How can I count the ways I am fed up?
The plan now is to jump Apple’s ship. This will entail an involved, brain-banging process.
- First I’ll have to save as much data as possible to disk or to DropBox. This will be a trick, because for years the Macbook has refused to back up to an external drive.
- Then I’ll need to trot over to Best Buy and score a PC, preferably as a laptop with Microsoft Office installed. (Mostly I use the big iMac desktop as a TV.) Get their techs to figure out how to access Dropbox and iCloud if possible and how to access MacMail (apparently this can be done, strangely enough).
- Relearn the use of MS Office, which I quit using years ago. This will entail spending some unholy amount of time at GDU’s or at the community college’s computer commons, pestering staff to help me figure out how to use newer versions of the software.
- Call Best Buy’s Geek Squad back in to attach the new laptop to the modem, which the Cox tech apparently up-gescrewed when he fiddled with it, fixing nothing.
- Trouble-shoot God only knows how many new nightmares that this process necessarily will cause.
- Eventually (I hope: not now!!) replace the iMac.
With any luck, by next week I can begin to migrate the Web Empire over into the PC environment.
It’s sad. I’ve loved my Apple computers, and I use them every day. But Apple has made it clear that the company does NOT want to deal with the likes of me. They’ve done everything they can do — purposefully or not — to make it hard for twerps like me to deal with them.
- They moved their place of business out of the North Central district, closing the Biltmore store and leaving only the Arrowhead and the Kierland Commons store — each about 15 miles from the central part of Phoenix, through heavy, obnoxious traffic.
- They do not have tech service that will come to your place of business or home to address issues (they never have offered any such thing, that I can recall).
- An Apple store is a madhouse. How their employees retain their sanity (if they do) is a mystery.
- If they suggest anything, it’s not remotely helpful. Apparently Apple repairs are expected to be a DIY adventure. Given the quality of their “class” on using the iPhone, they apparently don’t give a damn whether you ever do figure out how to use their devices effectively.
Meanwhile, Best Buy has staff who will come to your home, who are highly knowledgeable, and who can actually fix the current problem. These guys will explain what they think you need to know, so that by the time you’ve finished an exchange with them, you at least have some idea of what to do.
It’s hard to imagine how they stay in business. As one friend remarked, their customer-service behavior suggests that Apple has dedicated itself pretty much to the telephone business. Desktop and laptop computers are now a sideline — evidently one that they’d like to dispense with.
In my case, they’re gonna get their wish.