When you purchase a Mac at an Apple Retail store an employee will help you setup your e-mail accounts, walk you through the Mac App Store, setup an iTunes account for you, and show you the basic pointers of owning a Mac. Some stores will even have dedicated Mac setup stations. This is minor news for Mac aficionados but will be very helpful for people new to the Mac and for the wider range of consumers. The service will go live in some stores as soon as Tuesday but we’ve heard that other stores will be launching the service in the next few weeks. The new service is very similar to the “setup room” that is currently featured at Apple’s Covent Garden store in London.
I think this is a great move. In my days behind the Genius Bar, I saw many customers frustrated at the lack of support when they first got their Macs home. Those customers usually had to wait to be seen by a Genius1 or Creative, which could take days. This program should help with that, freeing up appointment slots for other customers.
I bet the return rate on Macs drops a bit, too.
-
When I was at Apple Retail, the Genius team was responsible for all data transfers to new computers — either from a Mac or a PC. I wonder if that’s changing. ↩︎