Kyle Thomas

The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)

The one about Apple Support in northern Canada

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Dear Apple,

This is not a letter of complaint but a note about the situation I have found myself in, that I’m sure others have also found themselves in.

I live in Yellowknife, NT. It is the capital of the Northwest Territories, nestled on the North Arm of the Great Slave Lake. It’s one of the deepest lakes in Canada, you know. If you still don’t know where we are, we are above Alberta. They have the oil, we have the diamonds. There are 20,000 people in this community I call home, 40,000 in the territory. We are a small, diverse group of forward thinking people. Yes, we live in a place that is buried in snow 8 months of the year. A place that can sit below -30ºC for weeks on end. We deal.

And we are a good bunch of people. Yellowknife itself is quite urban. We have high-rises, coffee shops and pubs. We have sports facilities and several big box stores. We are far from uncivilized, we are just far away.

Now that you know where we are you can better understand the predicament you have placed me in.

You see, I have a 2013 Apple 13″ MacBook Pro Retina. I bought it in December of 2013 and it is awesome. It is fast, it is small and it is powerful but it has a problem.

When this beast of a machine is sleeping it tries to wake itself up. This results in it crashing. This poor MacBook crashes when it sleeps too long. It is unfortunate.

I’ve tried to help it. Update it. Repair it. Reset SMC, PRAM, RESPECT. Oh, no wait, that last one is mine. The issue still precedes. So I took further measures. I wiped this bad boy clean and installed a fresh copy of your new sexy Mac OSX. Mr. Yosemite 10.10.

For sure you’d think a clean install is what I needed. A fresh start. A new begging. It’s what I thought my baby needed. Did it work though? No, unfortunately not. Last night at 3:07 a.m., according to the diagnostic logs, while sleeping, the glow of the Apple logo lit up skies of my bedroom and blast the start-up charm as it rebooted once again after crashing. The problem is still there.

So why am I writing to you today? I’m within the 1 year hardware repair warranty. I can just get my poor rMBP repaired. WRONG.

In talking to your lovely support for 59 minutes. Lizzy and Keith came to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do for me. I have to take my computer into an Apple Retail Store or Authorized Dealer. Apparently, you do not offer mail-in repair orders. Something to do with no repair centre in Canada or the postal service. There was no clear reason.

That doesn’t work for me, Apple.

Remember, I’m in Yellowknife. There is no Apple Retail Store or Authorized Dealer here. My closest option is Edmonton, Alberta. On a regular day a return flight can cost around $500+ and driving 1500km would not only take more than one day but would cost me around $700 return. So to get my Mac fixed, which is under warranty, I have to spend money.

I find this absurd because I bought the computer online. It was shipped to me. Telling me you don’t have a better solution for people like me, in my situation, is a complete oversight on your part. If you offer you devices online and allow them to be shipped all over the world, you should be able to accommodate my warranty repair and have a solution over the phone.

We haven’t even touched on the issues that I would – and probably will – have to be without my computer for a couple weeks when I’m self employed.

Apple, I’m not here to bash your products or support. I’m still going to use your products, because they are great and I like them. I just want you to know that people like myself are being put penalized by where we live and I think this is unacceptable of you, one of the biggest companies in the world.

Sincerely,

Kyle Thomas.

Photo from: Unsplash.com

Government Vs. My MacBook

I’m not going to get in to the details as to what I was doing but I will give you a quick recap.

I was going through parts of the Fedral Government website in the Business section or whatever it might be called looking for information on starting a business. The thing that drives me nuts about the government site is all the linking. You read one article which links to 10 other articles and each of those links to another 10 and so on. Call me stupid or challenged but that is confusing. I hate being directed around in circles by big websites. Did I find what I was looking for, No.

The next little issue that was pushing me over the edge was a form I was filling out online on the Government site. The form was for a business number but it seemed to be taking forever to respond to the server it was pulling and sending the information to. On top of me becoming impatient so was my computer because it started to freak out. It all of a sudden started to get glitchy and freeze up for 2 or 3 seconds at a time. At that point the fan was spinning at worp speed and sounded horrible. Then as if the computer said that’s it I have had enough and flicked an internal off switch, it dropped the Wireless connection and froze up. I was so mad I actually said “I want to throw you(my macbook) at the government” whatever that means.

I did not throw the computer. I did although let it cool down while I did the same. I then plugged it in and all was good again except I did not go back to the Government site. I didn’t think I will worry about it for now.

That was how 5 minutes of my evening went, how did yours go?

Yesterday had its excitment while I slept

Yesterday was full of 2 interesting findings, even though I slept all day.

The one thing I go excited about was some national recognition YkOnline received. Here is what happened. At about 6pm I got up and opened up my MacBook as I always do and checked my stats for both websites. When I saw that YkOnline had almost tripled the amount of hits it was normally gets I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was weird as the only post I had published in 5 days was about Yellowknife’s Twitter community and didn’t think it would get very much recognition and well I was right. As I scrolled down to see where the hits were being referred from I saw that most of them were coming from Miss604.com. If you don’t know about Miss604, you should check it out. Rebecca Bollwitt blogs about Vancouver and has become very famous do it, needless to say she is an idol of mine. So when I saw all these hits coming from her site, I quickly scrambled over there. I was delightfully surprised to read in one of her latest posts she linked back to YkOnline. Not only that she explained that we (as in Yellowknifers) have TweetUps and have a directory of all the Tweeps. I was so happy to see that not only YkOnline was getting recognized but also our Twitter community.

The other interesting thing about yesterday was what I found on my truck tires. Orange lines, could they be markings done by By-Law Officers. Read my post of YkOnline about what I think.

There you have it.