So, enter the Apple store at Lenox mall.  I walk in and instead of seeing shiny and awesome, I see croweded and hectic.  I actually was meeting Josh, and he wasn’t there yet, so I bolted and bought a new pair of Pumas, trying not to panic and be all introverted and bothered by the insane crowds.  So, I go back and start playing with a Mac.  It was shiny.  And nice.  Though, really, they should have them positioned at a higher level, because damn my wrist hurt quickly using a mousepad at such a low level.  I try to figure out how to get a sales person over to help, so I do my “Hi, my name is Eric and I’m awkward” deal and throw my hand up and say “help”.  Some guy sees me, kind of looks around like “is there anybody else who can help him” and then slowly comes over.  I probably screwed up, because I started off with “I’m a windows user looking to leave, and have very specific high maintenance requirements”, and then asked “can this macbook pro drive two external monitors?”.

“uhhmmm, yes”.

“Really?  Without anything extra?”

“Oh, you’d need an adapter that is like $20″

Josh chimes in: “Really?  Is that new, I thought it couldn’t be done without external stuff?”

“Hmmm, I’ll have to go find out for sure”

He returns several minutes later with a printed out blog post about how you actually can’t do it without external stuff.  Hmmm, sales guy has to go to Google to find out the answer?  This is not looking good.  So, I go and request another sales person to help me and get the poor first week on the job guy.  I tell him about the experience with the last guy (again, in hindsight, this served no purpose) and he didn’t fully understand and said “yeah, you can drive two external monitors!”.  Sigh.  The rest of the conversation went similarly “can I do x?”, “uhmmm, let me go check”.  What the hell?  Josh knew far more than they did about their own product.  The last question I wanted answered was what the return policy is.  He said “14 day full return policy” and when Josh pressed the issue, he went and checked and came back with “errr, there’s a 10% re-stocking fee”.  Beyond their sales guy not knowing anything about their product (he said he just completed a week of training… wonder if there was a test at the end of it that asked anything Mac related?), I think that return policy is terrible.  If they believe in their product, they’d offer a full refund.  Ecco shoes does, because their shoes are friggin’ awesome.