My computer is a few years old, and I was starting to panic. Should this computer die, I’m totally lost. My entire professional life (not to mention a lot of other stuff) resides inside it’s Apple-y glow. I’m approaching the hard drive’s capacity, and I know there’s plenty of stuff that doesn’t need to be a click away anymore. To ease my growing paranoia, I scoured the Black Friday sales, and decided that an external hard drive would be a nice Hanukkah gift to myself.
The nice people at Micro Center have NEVER steered me wrong, and I saw a really snazzy Western Digital 2 TB External Hard Drive on sale for $99. Score!
It took less than a minute to unpack the drive, plug it in, and hook up the USB to my MacBook. Then something awesome happened: My computer asked me if I’d like to partition the drive. I said yes. Then it asked if I’d like to use one of my newly partitioned drives as a Time Machine backup destination. Again, I said yes.
Setup, install, and starting the backup process took less than 5 minutes. It worked smoothly and successfully.
No doubt I could’ve done the same thing with a PC. I’m sure it could’ve been done for less money. But I seriously doubt that the process would’ve been as efficient and smooth.
Similarly, my iPhone is backed up to my Mac. Every time I plug it in, the computer and phone do all the work. No fuss, no compatibility issues, no drivers to update, no hardware conflicts, and never a blue screen of death.
My Macbook works just as well today as the day I bought it — 3 years ago! I’ve never once brought it in to be serviced, and never felt the need to do anything other than add some extra RAM because it was on sale!
As I survey the landscape for musicians and marketing (my area of expertise…), I notice that there’s very few opportunities that work in this same, obvious, and efficiently effective manner. It’s disheartening. There’s enough bullshit to go around, but somehow nobody has really made things work as well as Apple and their product suite.
Most of the questions I answer for clients are simply, “just call me. I’ll take care of it for you.” It’s the single best answer I can give, and it’s why folks pay me. Nobody wants to get a run around, and “please submit a support ticket” doesn’t instill much faith from the consumer. If I have a problem, I can go to any Genius Bar and talk to a real, live person. Where else does that happen — for free?!?
Sure there’re things about Apple that I don’t like, and I know people that swear by their Droids and Dells, but when every single product works out of the box — every single time — it makes you wonder why anybody bothers with anything else.
