DISQUS

These people are nothing new. Calling it "personal branding" is just a new term for the same old self-promotion There's nothing more annoying than a glad-handing sonofabitch whose only concern is that, at the end of the conversation (no matter what is being discussed) you remember his name, and his face. For preference, you'll also regard him as an expert on anything and everything, the PR researcher's "opinion leader" for your little circle.They're always about themselves. Always the first to feign knowledge and the last to admit ignorance. Rarely confrontational, always ingratiating, and always out to weasel their way into the head of anyone who isn't immediately put off by their greasy smile and oily conversation.They aren't a recent invention, and they aren't even original in their approach. They just have a new an wider vector for it, and a bigger swath of gullible mopes convinced that they're "in the know."

The guy's got a complaint, no question. He should check his state lemon laws. Lots of states protect consumers against that garbage.

What I adore, though, are the comments from people saying things like "I was all set to spend $3100 on a new MaBook Air, until I saw this. I'll just go get a Windows machine." As if one example of a bad machine is somehow the difference between one manufacturer and another. If that's the case, you're going to spend eternity bouncing around between makers, because they all fail.

I won't argue that the management's treatment was shabby, but I think you could take away a few other lessons.

1. Read the damn fine print, already. The old "you didn't warn me" saw doesn't cut it, Dave. How many customers do you think REALLY want their dead hard drives back? In a consumer-oriented installation, mind you, not some geek shop.

2. Did you run Disk Utility from the Boot Disk? You're supposed to be a geek...do a little troubleshooting. It would have told you if the disk had failed, and you could have saved yourself the aggravation. Leading me to...

3. Never pay Apple's price for service parts or upgrades you can buy off the rack. Fifteen minutes at Fry's or Micro Center and you'd have had a much larger hard drive, a fatter wallet (or less skinny, anyway) and less aggravation.

4. Your argument number 3 doesn't stand. They didn't say it was used, just that they couldn't guarantee it was new. Those two aren't explicitly equal.

Finally, just to echo what a few others have said, my experiences with the Genius Bar have been uniformly positive, with some rising to the level of outstanding. One case doesn't make a trend.

So, what you're saying then is that it's more important to make money than to publish facts?

Maybe _you're_ what's wrong here. You and Ryan, anyway. Covering ass with an excuse that basically amounts to "we needed to move before anyone else" is just bull.

Banitsa: I don't believe that's what is being implied at all. The scenario is that Windows malware could be made smart enough to figure out that it's running in a Parallels VM (which wouldn't be hard to do), and could then use Parallel's GFS feature to get root-level access to the Mac OS, wreaking whatever havoc the writer could figure out how to create (drop a payload for later delivery, figure out a way to propagate itself, wipe the drive via a UNIX command, etc.).

I can't see how people believe this is a problem for Microsoft, rather than Parallels. It's Parallels, not Windows, that is granting root privileges to the Mac environment. Parallels should shut the feature off by default, and should go to some length to make the user aware of the hazards of turning it on. Too many people are going to start from the assumption that their sandboxed Vista VM is safe and can't touch their Mac stuff, which appears not to be true at all, with GFS on.