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        Having great customer service will excuse a multitude of sins

The longer I use Apple [1] products, the more I feel like I don't actually
own the equipment, and that Apple wants me to use it according to how they
want me to use it, not how I want to use it. But then there are the times
when I'm reminded why i use Apple products—the curated experience is
wonderful!

I was reminded of this recently. On Saturday, Bunny spilled water on her Mac
laptop. Now, all the advice I read said that the first thing you do, before
anything else, is to

TURN OFF THE COMPUTER! IMMEDIATELY!

Unfortunately, we didn't know this and thus, the screen on Bunny's laptop
went deathly white and it started making this horrible death squeal as Bunny
was trying to sop up the water with a towel.

Sigh.

The second thing all the advice I read said was to dry out the laptop by
keeping it open, placing it keyboard down on a towel over a milk crate and
use a fan to blow air over it to dry it out, and to keep this up for up to 96
hours.

We managed maybe 48 or so before heading off to the Apple Store [2] to see if
they could help. Nope. It was dead [3]. So we ended up getting a new Macbook
Pro for Bunny. The sad part is, the new Macbook Pro had less memory (8GB
(Gigabyte)) than her now dead Macbook Pro (16GB) and (as it turned out, but
I'm getting ahead of myself) a smaller harddrive (128GB vs. 256GB).

We took it home, hooked up the external backup drive (Woot! Backups!), turn
on the laptop and waited. That's when we “recalled” her old laptop had a
larger harddrive. And at this point, it was a lost cause. The restore
procedure stated insufficient storage space and it was a rather painful
process to get past this. I tried doing a partial restore, selecting this and
that to restore, but it just didn't really work (I suspect the programmers at
Apple never really tested a partial restore). God it was painful. I could get
nothing restored properly.

So Tuesday we repacked the new laptop back into its box, and headed back to
the Apple Store. Now, despite the controlling nature of Apple, they do have
fantastic customer service and there was no issue at all at exchanging the
laptop we returned for one with a 256GB harddrive. Once back home, we plugged
in the backup drive, turned on the computer and waited.

A few hours later, (and all we did was just let it do its thing) everything
was back to the way it was before. Other than it being a new laptop, it was
like she never dropped water on it. Yes, you pay a premium to use Apple, but
sometimes, it's just worth it.

[1] http://www.apple.com/
[2] https://www.apple.com/retail/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH7KYmGnj40

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