Going Apple

Sunday I finally took the plunge and bought an iPad. The Chief and I went into the Apple store, I found someone to answer my questions, one of the sales folks rang me up (on her iPhone!) and e-mailed the receipt to my home. Then came the challenging part.

The sales person walked me over to the Personal Set-up table and handed me off to a lovely young lady who proceeded to help me get my iPad up and running. However, we ran into trouble almost immediately when my verizon and netscape e-mail addresses wouldn't synch up. It took about half an hour before they finally found the right documentation for the verizon set-up, and they never did find good instructions for getting the netscape address added to my iPad account. The whole set-up had me sitting there for nearly an hour and a half on Sunday - and we didn't even finish! - while various Apple staffers tried to solve the problem. The manager even came over and apologized, thanked me (more than once) for my patience, and let me have my choice of their spiffy magnetic covers for free.

We went back last night so that one of "my" techs from Sunday could redo my iTunes id, which we'd originally set up to the netscape address that the iPad wouldn't take. When we tried to change it to my verizon address, up popped the info - name, address and phone numbers - of somebody in Pittsburgh! Not wanting to mess up his account, the tech called him, explained the problem, got his e-mail - NOT the same as mine, despite what iTunes seemed to think - and gave him her info so he could be sure she was legit and was trying to make sure his iTunes account was secure. Murphy was obviously iPad shopping with me!

After about an hour, we finally got my iPad up & running and the tech gave us a demo of Apple TV. One of the other customers who was watching the demo declared it "Awesome!" I gotta agree; you plug the iPad into the Apple TV box, which connects to your flatscreen TV, and you can pull up TV shows or movies (hulu, netflix, itunes...) on the iPad and watch them on the TV. You can also use the tv as a computer monitor if you want to surf the web or watch embedded videos, and even enlarge those videos to full-screen - way cool!

The Chief studied laptops while I was getting my iPad worked on and was pretty impressed with a lot of what he saw. The Apple TV, though, really blew him away - he's been looking at flatscreen TVs off and on for a year or more, but I think this is gonna push him to buy one sooner rather than later. I may have to lock up my iPad so he can't "adopt" it from me. :D