30 Minutes at the Apple Store

I was having a problem with my iPhone, so I made an appointment and went out to my local Apple Store one afternoon to get it looked at and assess what my options were. Since I spent most of my visit sitting around waiting at the Genius Bar, I took note of the other people and issues that were being fixed, and thought I’d share.

Observation #1

There are a lot of older people at my Local Apple store in the afternoons. My first thought was that a relative had bought them a computer, or they saw them on TV and decided they wanted to try it out, not realizing that they were getting something other than Windows. However, I was impressed by their technical know-how when they were asked questions. Sure, there were one or two people there who wanted to be taught how to use a certain program, but most were having legitimate issues that required going to the store to fix. After my experience helping older people learn how to email, it was good to be reminded that older people aren’t inherently tech averse.

Observation #2

Across from me was a guy in his twenties who’d had his iPhone 6 stolen recently, and so he was trying to reactivate his old iPhone 4S. The technician took his phone into the back and emerged saying that it will work, it just needs charging. He plugs it in and says to just wait and it will turn back on. By the time I left 30 minutes later, it still wasn’t responding.

Observation #3

Right after I came in, a woman having iPhone trouble sat down next to me. She starts telling the technician that her phone isn’t ringing when, surprise, it starts ringing because the tech has her number on file. She looks a little dumb-founded, apologizes, and leaves.

Observation #4

I’ve only ever had good luck at the Apple Store. My iPhone 5's screen was detaching from the rest of the phone, and it turned out to be a swollen battery, which is covered under a special warranty and covered giving me a replacement iPhone 5 free of charge. All he had to do was open up the phone to make sure it was the battery, and he brought me out a new phone and had it set up after 5 minutes.

Observation #5

As I was leaving, an older man sat down across from me and started to enter into a frustrated rant about how his Apple products never work and his phone is just the latest exception. While he’s talking, his phone starts to ring and he quickly turns it off to continue digging into the poor technician.

Once the tech can finally get the guy to start telling him what’s wrong, the first thing he complains about is that his phone doesn’t ring. The tech asks if the guy heard his phone ring a couple of seconds ago, and he emphatically says no. The tech clearly isn’t sure what to do and sounds a little confused. He decides to move on and come back to the ringing issue and starts looking at the guy’s email with him. Turns out this man couldn’t figure out how to delete email, and thought it was a fault of the phone’s.

I was impressed by the tech keeping his cool and finding different ways to address the man’s problems while getting him to chill out a little. I could tell the tech was a little flustered, but he was able to disarm what at first seemed like it could turn into an ugly situation.

Conclusion

The Apple Store is a great place for people watching. It gives you a good idea of how hard it must be to help people navigate iProducts all day.