As I am want to do, I became involved in an exchange on Twitter with the lovely and talented Cal Evans concerning his thoughts about forsaking his current OS/hardware choice and going Mac instead. While this seemed like a slam dunk to me, one person’s experience seemed to be giving him pause. With Twitter’s 140 character limit, there was no way for me to do justice to a very positive experience I had with Apple customer service. So, I thought I would recount the story here for posterity.

One of my current employers, Amphora Research, purchased me a PowerBook in 2005 which served me faithfully for a couple of years, until the hard drive died. Conditioned as I was to sweat such events by years of Windows and Linux use, I was not looking forward to the road to recovery ahead. I was no “spring chicken” and had been religiously backing up the PB using SuperDuper. Nonetheless, I was apprehensive as I headed to the local Apple Store to see what the geniuses could do for me. We had purchased Apple Care for the PB. So I was hoping for minimal hassle.

Upon arrival at the Genius Bar, without an appointment (you could still do that in 2007), I was greeted by a very knowledgeable genius (redundant as that may sound) who, after listening to my sad story, asked me to be patient while he checked to see what hardware they had available. As it turned out, all they had was an 80GB drive in stock but my PB came with only a 60GB drive installed. Prepared to be disappointed, I was very pleasantly surprised when the the genius asked if I would mind the extra 20GB of storage. When I asked how much the extra 20GB would cost me I was once more pleasantly surprised when he told me there was no additional cost! He asked me if I had all my data backed up which I assured him I did, and he informed me that he would need to keep the bad drive which was no concern to me. Giving Apple one more chance to disappoint me, I asked when the laptop would be ready to pick-up. “Give me a half an hour” he said, and one strawberry smoothie later I was walking out of the Kenwood Towne Centre with a juicy little upgrade but anticipating a day or two of OS and application re-installation.

I recalled the Apple genius telling me restoring the drive would be a snap when I told him I had backed up the drive using SuperDuper. He could not have been more correct. Here is the entire restore process (windows and Linux users may want to turn away at this point!):

• Attach the SuperDuper back-up volume to the PB.
• Reboot the system and hold the Option key down during the restart.
• Select the back-up volume as the boot volume.
• Launch SuperDuper and copy the contents of the back-up volume to the internal hard drive.
• Reboot.

No OS re-install. No application re-install. Simply go back to work! It don’t get no better than this.

Shortly thereafter, my boss bought me a new MacBook which required service six months after its purchase that necessitated a week long stay at a local Apple service provider, ComputerDNA. What was I going to do without my Mac for a week? Keep on working! I booted a Mac Mini we used for pair programming from the SuperDuper back-up volume and composed and saved documents to the back-up volume as if it were the internal drive. Once my MB was returned, I restored the back-up copy to the internal drive of MB and all my new work was there waiting for me. There were no hardware issues booting the back-up created on my MacBook on the Mini, or booting the back-up updated on the Mini and restored to the MacBook.

I’ve been using Macs for ten years and as my OS of choice for four years now. When I “need” Windows or Linux I fire up VMware Fusion but I’m always relieved to return to OS X. When was the last time you were pleasantly surprised by your operating system?

PS: Just so you don’t think I’m too much of an Apple/OS X fanboy, FileVault SUCKS!!!