But why would they need a ‘genius bar’ if their equipment is reliable? I haven’t had to take my cell phone in for service, My AMD based machine has never needed service; my Pentium machine never needed service; Even my old 386 and Osborne never needed to be taken in for service.
If it is a difficulty of use problem instead of a hardware problem, perhaps Apple should start loading XP on their machines.
Re: why genius bar if equipment is reliable.
I have never has to return one of my Macs to Apple for repair either. That doesn’t mean the don’t have their share of broken or defective products. However, Apple has the lowest repair rate of any computer maker and by far the highest customer satisfaction rate. For the iPhone it’s in the low 90s percentile. The closest smartphone is at 52%.
With 25,000,000 OSX Macs, 110,000,000 iPods, and almost 2 million iPhones in the installed base even 1% failure rate (it’s higher than that) would mean a potential 1,370,000 users needing tech support. Apple provides much of it free of charge at their Genius Bars. Would you prefer to pay $80 an hour from the PC oriented Geek Squad?
As for usage issues, OSX is far easier to use and more reliable than Windows XP so why would Apple install a buggy, driver problem laden OS?