Delight and Dismay at the Apple Store

The other day I got to witness the most amazing experience of watching
a lady in her 70s touch an iPad for the first
time, and right before my eyes the delight and sparkle on her face
transformed her into a young girl again. It was
magical.

Yet this experience at an Apple Store in Ohio was marred by
some shockingly un-Apple bumps in the road.

I'm in America visiting my folks, and took the opportunity of being here
to help Ann, a family friend in her 70s, buy her
first computer. Until now her most technically-advanced electronics were
a flip-phone and a
television, but she was ready to take the plunge into email and
Facebook. She was familiar with the unrelenting
grief and despair Windows caused her husband, so she wanted something
different. We headed to the Apple Store.

It was packed, which as an AAPL shareholder I always like to see.

We were soon attended to by staff, and I let
Ann interact with them, describing what she wanted a
computer for, and listening to their ideas and recommendations.

First she was shown the lowest-end MacBook Air, a
tiny laptop. My mom has one of these and
earlier at lunch had shown it to Ann, and had raved all about it, so prior
to arriving at the store, Ann and I thought that
she'd probably buy a MacBook Air. Under direction
of the Apple sales staff, Ann used a MacBook Air
for some basic web surfing and email, and seemed pleased. She took to it easily.

Then she was shown the same basic browsing and email on an iPad Air.
Over the course of a few minutes Ann's demeanor
changed from mild interest (she'd heard of these “iPad” things before)
to pure, unfettered delight.

I've never seen anything like it, and I cannot
begin to adequately describe the situation.

Ann has a youth and vibrance that belies her age, with an easy laugh and
smile that I've seen many times, but nothing prepared me for the reaction
written across her face... giddy, unadulterated, sparkling delight.
There's no other word for it.

As she exclaimed “This is it, this is
for me!”, I told her that the sparkle in
her eyes made her look 30 years younger, but in reality the only time I've
ever seen something even close is when a
young child gets the toy they've been wanting. But this was less materialistic, more pure. I imagined a duck living in
the desert for decades not knowing that water even existed, finally
entering a lake for the first time. I feel I'm a better person
just for having witnessed it.

In comparison, the exuberant “amaaaazing”
reaction of my 23-month-old niece to her first iPad experience seems
pale (but if you've not heard the short audio on that post, it'll
certainly bring a smile to your heart).

Anyway, Ann bought an iPad Air, a wireless keyboard, and a case/cover, and Apple staff helped her set it up.
Both before and after the sale, staff spent considerable time with her,
never rushing, never pressuring, always patient. Ann
felt truly the center of their attention, with their concern not for
the sale but for her happiness and satisfaction. It was
a wonderful experience.

That was the good. The rest of this long story is not always so good.

Setup of the iPad involved creating Ann's first email account, and
this is where I got my first surprise of the day.

I figured that they would create an iCloud account for her, but no, to
create an Apple ID they needed an email account from outside the Apple
ecosystem, so they created a GMail account for
her. This struck me as very odd, but hey, they're the experts.

They then used her GMail address to create an Apple ID for her, and set
up her iPad. They helped her install the Apple Store app, then used that to
schedule a free training class at the store next week.

Pleased as punch and floating on air, we went to her house to show her
husband, and we sat for some basic lessons. I
showed Ann how to surf the web, make bookmarks, do email and create
contacts, Facetime video conference, use the camera, check the calendar,
talk to Siri, etc. She took to it very
easily.

But we ran into some problems that I didn't know how to solve.

Disappointment #1 for the day was that the iPad Air Smart Case didn't
seem to fit her iPad Air very well, and the hole for the camera didn't line
up properly. When deciding on what model of iPad to buy, Apple staff had
explained the differences between the “iPad Air” and
the “iPad Air 2” included subtle physical differences like
the location of the camera, so it seemed to me that Ann must have been sold
the wrong case. Yet the labeling on the box for
the case (“iPad Air Smart
Case”) clearly matched the labeling on
the box for the iPad (“iPad Air”) —
neither referenced the “Air 2” we'd seen on packaging for the newer models
— so I was confused.

Disappointment #2 for the day was in my call to Apple Care to ask about
the issue. The lady who answered my call seemed
utterly uninterested in life, doing her job on autopilot just to get to the
end of the shift. I've had more enthusiastic calls with the DMV.

So we went back to the Apple Store and showed the clearly-misaligned
camera hole along with the clearly-matching packaging. I figured we be told
“yikes, sorry about that, here's the proper case”, but instead we
got an inexplicable “Yeah,
sorry, it's hard to explain”.

The guy tried to explain something that he clearly didn't understand
well himself, causing me to finally interrupt him and say “look, she just wants a
case that fits her iPad. She doesn't care what it's called... can
you show her something that actually fits what she just bought?”.

Again the response was unexpected. I thought
he'd say “Sure, just a
moment”, but instead we got a
“I don't know,
but we can go take a look.”. Wow, this was not the Apple Experience I was expecting. How hard can it be?

It was a fiasco. They had a huge wall of cases, with half clearly marked
“iPad Air 2” and the other half clearly marked “iPad Air”. You'd think that it couldn't be simpler,
but in reality all the cases were for the iPad Air
2, including those marked “iPad Air”. Why were they
explicitly labeled differently when they were explicitly for the same
device, and explicitly incompatible with the device for which it was
labeled??? It was beyond surreal.

The guy explained that if you looked on the back of the “iPad Air” package, the little sticker with the
barcode included microscopic text that said “(second generation)”, meaning it was for the iPad
Air 2. The logical person inside of me
wanted to explode at the stupidity of it... not only of the misleading
labeling, but mostly at the unmitigated stupidity of how the Apple Store
handled the display and sales. The guy who sold
Ann the iPad Air explicitly mentioned the differences between the models
and explicitly told her that the iPad Air 2 cases
wouldn't fit her purchase, yet somehow didn't realize that the “iPad Air” cases wouldn't either. This was his job.
How could Apple Staff not know this? The Air 2 has been on sale for almost a year...
were we the first to discover this crazy labeling. Beyond surreal.

In marveling at the absurdity of the situation, I
happened to noticed that one of the “iPad Air”
cases did not have the “second
generation” microtext on the back. Oh, we're
told, this one does fit Ann's purchase. Apple Staff hadn't realized
they had these mixed in there. Of perhaps the 70
“iPad Air” cases on display, I
noticed three that would fit Ann's “iPad Air”.
She didn't like the color, but it was that or nothing, so she exchanged the
case. The guy offered to order her the color of her choice and swap it out when
it arrived, but by this time we just wanted to move on.

(The only plausible explanation for the labeling that I can come up with is that when Apple started selling
cases for the new iPad Air 2, they still had
a huge stockpile of packaging for the original
model that they didn't want to waste, so they shoved the new cases into the
old packaging and slapped the microtext sticker on the back. When that ran
out, new packaging included the proper “iPAd Air 2” on the front,
and this mix of labels we saw at the store reflected the mix of old and new
stock. On the other hand, I
have not been able to come up with a
plausible explanation for how the Apple Store handles this mix as
they do, utter than pure apathy and incompetence.)

Overall, what a disappointing, un-Apple-like experience. Things were about to get worse.

I had two questions about the email app, both leading down holes I never
would have imagined.

The first seemed pretty simple: why is there no “trash” icon when
viewing an email message? How do you delete a message? The identical app on
my iPhone has a trash icon that's obvious and intuitive, but on Ann's iPad
the same spot instead has what looks like a filing-cabinet icon whose
purpose didn't seem apparent, and upon testing we couldn't figure out what
it actually did.

The guy spent a considerable time in the labyrinth of iPad settings and couldn't
figure it out, so we put that on the back burner and moved on.

My second question was about push notifications for new messages. It
didn't surprise me that push notifications wouldn't work when connected
only via Wifi, so I just asked to confirm this.
But no, I was told that they should work. Ann
wasn't getting notifications when I sent test
emails, so the guy dives again into the labyrinth of settings for what
seemed an eternity, only to end up suggesting to switch from GMail to
iCloud for her email.

Just a few hours prior we'd been told that a
non-iCloud account was required, but now we were being told to
switch to iCloud. I didn't want Ann to have to
juggle two email addresses, but no worries, Apple Staff told us, we'll
switch your Apple ID registration to your iCloud address so that you can
completely abandon the GMail address. Geez, okay, why didn't we do this
from the start, but okay, let's do it.

So he create the new account and we explained everything to Ann, who for
the first time in the long day was starting to show signs of being
overwhelmed. Once things were finally set up, test emails from me showed up
on her iPad with immediate notifications as we wanted, so it was worth it.
Then he went to switch her Apple ID registration over to her iCloud address
so that she could completely abandon the GMail address they'd made for her
earlier, and he hit a snag... it wouldn't let him
switch.

Clearly this staff member was outside his area of expertise, but instead
of asking one of his more-experienced colleagues, he starts Googling for
a solution. This did not inspire confidence, and
I “strongly encouraged” him to ask someone for help. He did, and the end
result was that we backpedaled on the whole iCloud thing, reverted back to
GMail, and simply gave up on push notifications. By this
point the store was closing and we just wanted to get out of
there.

But somewhere along the way he had figured out how to get the trash icon
for Ann, so at least we had that going for us.

Overall Ann was thrilled with her first foray into high tech, but wow,
the experiences at the Apple Store sure put a
damper on things. As a tech geek I was mortified, and as an APPL
shareholder I worry how this bodes for Apple's future.