Thanks, Apple

Shockingly (oh, how naive!), we've been out of a computer, off and on, for just about two months now. A one-year old Apple iMac whatever (early 2008 20" iMac), purchased September of 2008, crashed suddenly. Good thing we had purchased the extended warranty Apple Care whatever, allowing us to take the machine to the Apple Genius Bar (rather than being shit-out-of-luck, as we would have been had we not purchased the extended warranty Apple Care) and be told the hard drive was dead, likely due to a manufacturing error. They replaced the hard drive (took seven days) and then we got it back and it still didn't work. Back and forth to the Genius Bar we go... now it's the logic board... wait, no it's not... repeat three times. Finally a traveling Genius (Mac Medic) comes to our house... opens the machine, tells us that the in-store Genius ruined a cable (the cable looks like a Listerine breath strip) with a tweezer, and he's going to suggest we be sent a replacement machine.

Apparently the FOURTH REPAIR is the ticket: if your machine needs a fourth repair they will replace your machine.

The new machine was released November 1st, but we didn't get it till November 12th, because of course it came from China and then went to Alaska and finally came to California.

Whew! The moral of the story is... I'm not sure what the moral of the story is! Apple could take a lesson from Zappos!