I experienced two quite different sides of Apple today – the Steve Jobs keynote, and a personal experience with my troublesome MacBook.

The keynote was everything you would expect it to be – well choreographed, lots of big announcements, the best left for last and so on. Even despite all the rumors, there were still some surprises in there, and the crowd seemed genuinely appreciative of the new applications which were demoed, even though those demos did seem to go on a bit long. The iPhone 3G is, like its predecessor, a phenomenal device, and when I hear people say it doesn’t do anything differently or better than other phones out there, I just find myself wondering if they’ve ever actually seen one up close and played with it. The thing is in a league of its own for me, in terms of design, user interface, browsing experience, email, applications and so on. The only things preventing me from getting one previously were speed, price, and the sense that a better version would probably turn up soon. Come 11 July, I’ll be first in line at my local AT&T store.

On the other hand, my personal experience with Apple over the last few months has been wretched. My hard drive failed a few weeks ago, and the process of getting it fixed was tedious to say the least. I had to make an appointment for technical support at my local store, they determined the hard drive had failed, but wanted to charge me to copy my files off it. So I declined, did it myself back at home, but then had to make another appointment to take it back in. Picked it up a few days later only to discover when I got home that they had forgotten to install iLife on it. Took it back again, etc. Finally got it home, reinstalled everything, moved images, music etc. back onto it, finally had everything back the way I like it, and then today had the same early symptoms as last time pop up again. The thing no longer starts under Mac OS X, only Vista.

So I called technical support, since my local store had no technical support slots left today, and spent a total of 2 hours or more on the phone with various different people trying to convince them that simply repeating the process I went through last time wasn’t going to reassure me that this wasn’t going to happen again. Their standard policy is that they will fix a device 3 times before allowing you to receive a replacement, even if it’s a hard-drive failure as it has been twice now for me. It wasn’t until I had kept some poor customer service person on the phone for a good 45 minutes repeating over and over again that the solution she was proposing was unacceptable that she finally transferred me to someone with more clout who was willing to concede that giving me a new machine was the right thing to do.

The contrast between these two experiences – the real excitement associated with a new product launch from Apple, and the sheer frustration involved with being a customer when a product goes wrong – almost couldn’t be greater. Is this the same company? Yes. But does their customer service match the high expectations they create through their carefully choreographed keynotes, flawless demos and clever advertising at the expense of the hapless PC? I’m not so sure.

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