For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Apple Care. There’s something to be said for an operation where you can make an appointment, walk in and generally get a repair or replacement within a couple of minutes.

After a few weeks of struggling with a glitchy iPhone, I finally decided to make my appointment before I was too tempted to send my phone hurtling towards the fireplace. I’m pretty sure blunt force trauma isn’t something that’s covered as warrantee work. After meeting with my “Genius,” the official diagnosis was “home button intermittent.” The cause, officially listed as “You have too many apps running in the background.” The exchange went a little like this:

Genius: If you shut those down once a day you shouldn’t have a problem.

Me: Yeah, I do that already. I’ve even done the half dozen other “fixes” recommended in the forums.

Genius: Ok, I’ll shut them down and you should be good to go

Me: Uhhh… yeah.

This is the point in the day where we spent five minutes trying to get the home key to respond in any way.

Genius: Well, we’ve managed to reproduce the problem.

Me: Yep.

Genius: Uhhh… Why don’t we just get you a replacement…

Me: Perfect

I had also hoped to look at the possibility of swapping out my iPad because of a stuck pixel. One very annoying bight blue stuck pixel. Apparently, though, some degree of “stickage” is considered to be within performance standard. On an $800 consumer electronic product, zero defects should be the performance standard, but arguing with the genius wasn’t going to get me anywhere. In fairness, she did offer to swap it out using my one-time warrantee replacement for accidental damage, but being this early in the life cycle, and given that I’m tapping this post out one handed, balancing my iPad on my knee over a concrete floor while holding a steaming cup of coffee with my left hand, I decided the better part of valour was probably holding the freebie in reserve until something apocalyptic happens.

But for the record that one dead pixel is super annoying.