Walt-O-Matic

Aurora Feint won’t start.

I’ve been playing Aurora Feint on the iPhone, and all of the sudden, it quit working. The game, not the phone. I’d go to start it, and then get returned to the main menu. Seems other people were having a similar problem. Some were lucky to get the game working again, others lost data.

Here’s how I recovered mine, preserving game play. Your mileage may vary.

0. Back up your iPhones by syncing it with iTunes.
1. Hold down the Aurora Feint button until the icons jiggle.
2. Press the (X) delete button over the Aurora Feint icon.
3. Acknowledge that you’re deleting the game and that all game files may be lost.
4. Hold down the power button on the phone, slide to Power Off.
5. Power phone back on.
6. Immediately go into App Store, select Search, enter Aurora Feint, and Install.
7. Acknowledge dialog that you already purchased this item and want to install again.
8. Let the game download and install.
9. Again, hold down the power button on the phone, slide to Power Off.
10. Power phone back on. For me the phone went through a very long boot cycle with the Apple logo.
11. Press the Aurora Feint icon to start the game.
12. For me, the screen went blank and stayed there — tap the center of the screen, movie controls appeared.
13. Unpause movie intro and let play to completion.
14. After a moment, I was returned to the map.

I’ve found that I always have the best of luck restoring the game when I’m at the map. Exiting while at the character page or in the middle of a mining activity does work, but not always; this causes the game to be fussy and exit prematurely to the main screen after start (unless you can intercept with a tap in the upper right corner).

Good luck.

Today I learned that there’s a nifty little utility called Maintenance 3.8 out on Apple’s site. You can find it by going to Apple / Mac OS X Software…, and when the web page pops up, type Maintenance in the search box.

It’s an automator script to repair permissions, verify preferences, updating prebindings, do cleanup, update databased, rebuild indexes, empty Trash, and so forth. My guess is it’s much like Onyx.

Deciding to give it a try, I downloaded it, opened the .DMG file, and double clicked the automator icon, selecting Restart when done. And while I got a very little in the confirmation department that things were working, I saw a lot of CPU activity running utilities I was familiar with.

So, with the laptop plugged in, I left to to chug away. I heard the restart sound several minutes later. And, I ignored it.

Later, I picked up my laptop and went to login.

Nothing.

The “breathing LED” on the front was off, and nothing was responding keyboard or mouse wise. The screen was black.

So, I decided to check the battery. Full power.

But then I noticed something. At the steep angle, in the near pitch black of my LCD screen, I saw the login window. What was happening: the backlight wasn’t coming on. Fiddling with the brightness control didn’t help either.

Sure enough, I could make out the cursor once I located where it was.

I tried opening and closing the lid. Nope. Backlight still off.

So, I restarted (as I mentioned, it was operational, I could barely make out the GUI).

The machine sprang to life, showed me the blue background, and right before it went to the login screen, the backlight cut out again, leaving me in pitch black.

Titling the screen back again (with the keyboard sticking up in the air and the screen flat on the table), again I could make out the login box and mouse. I did a restart again.

This time I held down Command-V as it booted. And I watched as it came up, lots of normal diagnostic messages, and then the blue background, and right as the login screen appeared, back to pitch black.

Annoying. But now I’m wondering if all the times I’ve ever woken my laptop after a case where the lid didn’t quite clasp perfectly, was this what was happening — could the machine be up, but the backlight off?

So, one last time, I restarted. Only I held down Command-Option-P-R (four fingers) to reset the power management settings. Several chimes later, I let go, and the machine booted perfectly, and the login box appeared, backlight and all.

I’m hoping that my experience may lead to an additional piece of the puzzle about the Mac waking up funny. I would have never have noticed anything on the screen if I looked at it dead on, as I always do.

It’s fairly well known that if you close the Mac’s lid, but down engage it fully, the lid will pop back up, but not after putting the machine to sleep. At that point, it becomes a little dance with the lid, trying to get the lid back down, so that the machine can see it re-open, and that usually wakes it. But sometimes the screen is still dark, and you have to play with the power button (and if frustrated, hold it down to restart).

Sometimes this same problem manifests when you wake the machine, enter your password, and suddenly everything goes dark. You wiggle the cursor and hit the keys and nothing happens. Caps Lock toggles, but it feels like it’s gone back to sleep.

Well no more. From now on, I’m going to tilt my screen back and see if I’m operational. That way I won’t lose data from an unnecessary restart.

Total speculation follows.

This weekend, I was at the Apple Store, and managed to get into a rather in depth conversation with someone, who, well, really knew their stuff. More so than other store employees I’ve chatted with, and some of them were pretty good.

I was passed the observation that an interesting “event” had occurred rather silently.

They ran out of iPhones.

This person explained to me that Apple does a really good job of keeping them stocked, since they were a major supplier for the area. However, they were clean out.

The only times that ever happened, was when Apple was about to change inventory on them. Killing the 4GB model was one. Going to the 16GB was the other.

A 32GB or 64GB iPhone seems likely, as iPhone customers want as much memory as an iTouch allows.

This would be a good time to add additional gestures, which, incidentally would help out with the lack of cut’n'paste.

But the real feature I’m looking for? The ability to push my contacts to other people with an iPhone. We’ve got the same device, the same applications, the same data, and bluetooth, there’s no technical reason I can’t give someone my ‘electronic business card’.

Last year when I bought my iPhone, I tried registering it at the store with an Apple Genius at my side.

This popped up. Amusing as it was, I took a snap shot of it and had been meaning to share it for a while now.

Perhaps it was a time when Apple’s servers were being over whelmed. Nonetheless, it might provide some insight as to what they’re doing.

NOTE: I tried later that evening and it worked fine; my iPhone has been operating just fine.

While trying to iChat using Leopard to a system running Tiger, I ran into a problems that I never had using OS X 10.4 before: bad video quality to downright refusing to connect.

With a little research, I ran across this article and that was enough to resolve the problem.

Here’s how to get iChat working on OS X 10.5
…if you’re running Parallels.

See, turns out that Parallels, I’m using 3.0 Build 5582 (Dec 5, 2007), appears to be running some services, even when the virtual machine is active, that gets in the way of iChat.

Get out of iChat.

Go to Apple / System Preferences…, select Network, and click on Parallels NAT and change the Configure drop down to Off; then go to Parallels Host-Guest an change the Configure drop down to Off. Press Apply.

Get back into iChat and try again. For me, it instantly fixed the problem.

I’ve just discovered that I can crash the Finder, not that this inhibits anything in that it instantly restarts…

1. Pick any FOLDER that’s on your desktop. Press Command-I to get info.
2. In the bottom right is a pad lock, click it, and enter your password so you can change permissions on the folder.
3. To the far left of the padlock is a plug sign. Press it.

For me, I instantly get an error on the console that the Finder exited abnormally with a bus error; this is usually a pointer trying to access memory that it’s forbidden to. The CrashReporter logs the event, and Finder restarts, closing the Info window that was just open.

While I can reproduce it effortlessly, can any one out there?

Today I was forwarded a review of OS X entitled: Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m a fan of Apple, in general, as I find their hardware, environment, and tools far more productive for my development, office, and home needs than I ever did using Microsoft or its products.

I think it’s also fair to say that I’m willing to also point out when things don’t work:

• Duplication Menu Item Problems
• Having to rebuild Spotlight indexes, manually
• And, more recently, Four complaints of Leopard
• And very recently, Five Things I Can’t Do With OS X Mail RSS

Oliver Rist, raises some very good points in his treaty on Leopard’s recent similarities to Vista’s screw ups.

Here’s my take on his five points.

Vista Similarity 1: Wait for a Service Pack—Perpetually

Rist is right in saying that “[With Tiger] Everything. Just. Worked. Period.” I’m also quite in agreement that with Vista, even “a year after its shrink-wrapped release” it still has problems, driver issues, and “doesn’t work with 50 percent of new software.”

But I wonder how far back he’s actually recalling. Historically, I recall that each early version of Apple’s OS had serious kinks. Is comparing Tiger 10.4.9 with Leopard 10.5.1 actually a valid Apple to Apple comparison? (excuse the pun)

I’m with Rist if he thinks it should be, but accept the reality it isn’t. In my mind, Apple changed a number of things about the OS that they didn’t have to. Stability, size reduction, and additional hardware support will always earn high marks on my reviews. Unless the new glitz is functional, it doesn’t do much for me; but more on this in a moment.

At the moment, I’m tolerant because historically Apple has made right in reasonable time. By 10.4.3 and 10.4.4, I was quite happy. Given that I suspect Apple’s real purpose was not to make GUI fluff, but to pave the way for resolution independent graphics and new Core Animation, I’m surprised how well things held up.

Microsoft, Direct X improvements aside, gets no such pass, because as a whole, I still have problems with the OS, and it’s been around longer, and had more people working on it.

That said, I’m also aware that a good number of the Microsoft blue screens of death aren’t Microsoft’s fault — directly. When drivers do bad things, it can topple an OS. Of course, this leads me to wonder why Microsoft didn’t manage their kernel layers a bit better.

Knowing this actually provides some insight for Leopard as well. Everyone understood how Tiger worked. Too well, perhaps. There were quite a number of OS resource tweaks that delivered amazing integration and features. I was certainly one of the advanced users.

However, Apple assumes, and I think rightly so, that if you intend to do an upgrade in place, then if you’ve changed the operating system out from underneath them, you roll the dice. A number of people were bit by Unsanity’s Application Enhancer that didn’t upgrade at the last moment before installing Leopard.

Keeping up to date with OS X third-party applications is just as hard as it is on Windows. That’s why I eventually plopped down the money for Version Tracker Pro. Had I not, I would have been one of those that the new install would have taken out. Diligence is king.

Even so, my problems with an Upgrade was slightly broken features, like the password working after a screen save (despite the settings to the contrary), and performance. I later learned that the former was a permission problem on the preference, and the latter was a library extension that didn’t work with Leopard and just tried to keep reloading itself.

My solution was to do an Archive and Install. All of my options were preserved, just like an Upgrade in place, but because the OS was virgin fresh, my system behaved wonderfully.

I give Apple this round, simply because a “fresh install” with Microsoft is so destructive.

Oh, and yes, once you’ve touted something as a “new” feature, like 64 bit, you can’t do it again for the next release. That’s cheating.

Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz

I love eye candy as much as the next guy, and in my operating systems too.

However, I question the real value one gets out of it. As long as it doesn’t get in the way, that’s great. If it communicates more information subtly, that’s great too. Incidentally, what I mean by that is effects, like Genie, which show where your Window is going when you minimize it, is useful.

All these different preview modes, sliding covers, and non-sense, I could really care less about.

Though, I have to admit I’m a closet user of them. Sometimes it easier to quickly view an image to make sure I’ve got the right one, or scan the contents of a document because a poorly chosen filename was used. I’d like to think Apple could have done this without the big production.

What really gets my goat, however is that Tiger had transparent Windows. Then it went away! That really made me mad, because I was using them since I had a small desktop.

So, that made me go find Virtue, in order to have multiple desktops. My gosh, I loved that product. Where else could you have different backgrounds, on a 3D cube, and get to them by keystrokes, mouse maneuvers, or tilting or laptop or waving your hand over it and triggering the ambient light sensors!

But then Apple went and created Spaces. With no real future, Virtue is going away - - and killing off a fantastic sales tool for me. With no competition, I don’t see Apple adding these things back.

And, only now, are we starting to talk about the transparency I had before. Argh!!!

So, while Vista is pretty, and Apple is pretty, Apple got by for having slightly more than fluff for fluff’s sake. Apple gets to take this round, begrudgingly.

Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface “Fixes”

I’ve got to say, again, I agree with Oliver. The new dock may look pretty, but Apple had an uncanny way of letting me know what was going on with those nice, readable from a distance, black, unobtrusive triangles.

Do I have a way to get them back?

Can I switch an put the dock on the side and get something more acceptable looking? Yes, but then again I don’t want it on the side.

It’s crappy decisions like this that cause people to write utilities to hack the operating system which cause the initial instability problems in the first place.

Using Vista as the example, just because something is pretty doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable to use.

Having said all of the above, I have to admit that many of the things I initially didn’t like, I quickly grew to use. They bother me less.

Let’s just say in this round, the bell rang, and there was no winner.

Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking

I groan when I see Microsoft operating systems splinter over stupid artificial limitations like how many network connections can be concurrently inbound or outbound. I shake my finger at any operating system which can’t handle jumbo packet sizes or let me switch between 10/100/1000 ethernet speeds.

But I do accept that Windows shares, using Samba, can be difficult with Microsoft deliberately sabotaging protocols to force a homogeneous network with them being the vendor. Embrace and Extend. Anti-Trust. Bogus interoperability. Halloween Memos. I just can’t take the message that Microsoft is out to help me seriously anymore; too much bad history; too little progress. DRM, WGA, poison pill updates, spying - that’s the reason I left Microsoft.

While I recognize that Apple and Microsoft are in a cat’n'mouse game for accessing Windows resources, I do have a complaint to put on Apple’s shoulders.

And that is: just because I have a network, doesn’t mean I want to network. Unless I’m trying to comb my network’s machines, don’t bring them all to my Finder. I don’t need that. I know what kind of network traffic Microsoft generates.

On the other side of the coin, VNC is now built in. And, well, wow. Apple, you did well there. It’s almost as if Apple knows I’m slowly expelling Microsoft and replacing it with Unix systems.

But that doesn’t change the fact that when I do need access to a Windows box, and I’m using my Mac, I want it to be just as seamless. Just the other day, I tried to copy a file from a Windows share to my local desktop to work with a local copy. Locally. (Sense a theme?)

The Windows box said “that file is in use” (because someone had the network Excel file open) and wanted to know if I wanted a read-only copy. The Mac, however, simply said Permission Error and never told me why.

Apple: I need error messages to not be so abstract. Give me a way to Option-Click on them or something and dump the error.h code; in short, if I’m smart enough to fend for myself, let me. Or, just make it work.

I assume people have already heard that if you Move (not copy) a file from one resource to the other, if the destination is full and aborts the copy, the source file still gets deleted (the other half of the move). I hope that’s fixed.

Now, the sheer fact that Microsoft has a horrible time with other OS’s (and depends on them playing by their rules), the final score for this one goes to Apple. Though Apple got lucky.

Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck

Oliver and I may start to part ways at this one, although not that far.

All the standard home and media applications Apple bundles with their OS are really top notch in my opinion. In fact, I buy iWork in addition to iLife. It’s Apple’s Pro applications that use a interface that I find very dated. And ugly.

But the feature we all seem to gripe on is Time Machine.

My first experiences with Time Machine were horrible. The system would seize up, and, well to be fair, I have to admit that this all went away after I did an Archive and Install, rather than the Upgrade in place over my existing patched OS Tiger.

And, while I applaud the concept of Time Machine, I don’t like that I can’t force it to kick off when I want. Or that I can’t easily point it at a common server. Or use it wirelessly.

But my biggest beef is why in the world Apple just didn’t hold off, wait until ZFS was working the way they wanted, and delivered something that managed things directly with the filesystem itself.

In addition to Time Machine, I find myself using SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner to make quick, efficient backups, that are also bootable.

What I think Oliver might have missed is a subtle difference.
- With Time Machine, everything is backed up.
- Not that Time Machine backs up everything.

Let’s cover that a little closer. Time Machine does do a full backup, but then everything from then on out is incremental. And intelligently so. In fact, you can even go wandering around the files on the backup disk directly, should you choose to.

The way I’m reading things is that the review gives the impression everything is always backed up. That’s just not so.

Would I like to be able to tell Time Machine to only back up what I want it to? Yes. Please.

Would I like to only delete the things I intend to? Of course. But, realistically, it’s when I delete an important system file, and Time Machine has a copy, that I’ll suddenly become more forgiving of why it does what it does.

All his GUI gripes with Time Machine are dead on. However, when you get Time Machine working (via a clean Archive and Install - which keeps your preferences, data, and applications, btw), it does work as advertised.

It’s close. Time Machine’s integration is trivial. But over all, I think Vista’s backup, is better in the long run. Vista wins this round.

Oliver, I think, in this case was guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To be ticked off at the first version of a new application that could have been better, is justified. To extend that assessment to all bundled apps, as he does in his title, is not.

What the world hates is that after buying the OS, you still can’t do much with it. With Apple you can. And, with most Window machine purchases, you get a lot of crapware. Apple, you don’t.

In fact, I think Apple misses the mark. QuickTime Pro should be bundled with the OS, and if they were really on top of things, iWork as well. I’d gladly even pay the full retail price rolled into the cost of the machine. Why? Because can you image if everyone’s machine out of the box shipped with software that could do Office related stuff? You’d have a killer do-all platform from time the machine was powered up. There’s no way Microsoft could do that.

So, while Vista won this round, I’m gonna give Apple half-credit, since I think it was an unfair contests.

Walt’s Final Score

Apple 3.5 / 5; Vista 1 / 5.

I’d still rather use OS X Leopard than Vista any day of the week.

Walt gives OS X Leopard a thumbs up, even though it still needs some work.

I notice with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’s new Mail integrated RSS reader, once I have a feed there’s a few minor annoying limitations that aren’t available.

1) While I can review what the RSS feed URL is by hovering over it, I can’t copy it to the clipboard.

2) If the RSS feed location changes, I can’t change the feed’s URL.

3) I’d love to be able to drag the RSS icon to a browser and have it open the page.

4) Or, I’d like to be able to right click the feed and have it open it in a browser or my default RSS reader (NetNewsWire).

5) Drag the RSS feed icon, or an article from the feed, into an open Mail message to share the URL.

I hope Apple will enhance the feature capabilities soon.

Before we begin, let me say that I like Apple and that I had a very smooth transition to OS X 10.5 Leopard. I had the foresight to upgrade all of my applications, thanks to Version Tracker Pro pointing out what needed upgrading. And, I also had the foresight to update Unsanity’s Application Enhancer before doing the OS X upgrade.

Things couldn’t have been smoother. Shortly after inserting the disc, I was running the upgrade, and my desktop, data, applications, and settings were all preserved perfectly. I’ve never had that kind of experience with Windows.

That said, there are four complaints I have regarding Leopard.

One: Dot-Mac is in-your-face. There’s a new icon in the status bar at the top for .Mac, and you can’t get rid of it with the preference pane unless you sign up for a trial account. Then the preference pane gives you the option.

Come on Apple, that’s so unlike like you.

Here’s why I don’t want .Mac in a nutshell: I have Linux, and it does a better job. I can secure FTP, secure copy, and rsync; it has Apache, Lighttd, and a host of other web servers; it has Sendmail, Postfix, and other mail options; it has DNS, ssh, X-Windows and other services; it has Samba; it has multiple accounts, with permissions; and it has far, far, far more than 10GB of disk space. For those of us with Unix experience and servers of our own, we don’t need .Mac, therefore, we don’t want it on our desktops. It comes across as an overly inflated service that can be mimicked by simple services included in the standard install of Ubuntu. And it’s free.

Sure, some people don’t know how to set it up, and they might want it, but don’t force it on my desktop.

Two: The Finder’s Sidebar has much smaller icons. Plus, for example, the desktop icon doesn’t mimic the desktop wallpaper I’m using. I liked large, findable, easily clickable icons.

Three: It feels like it boots slower. Yes, once I’m in it, it feels very snappy. And, intellectually, I know that a one time short wait is worth far more than perpetual ongoing stalls, though emotionally, to be honest, I haven’t gotten used to it.

Four: Stability. Yes, that’s right, I said stability. As in, it has problems.

My first experience was when someone handed me a disk with .JPG images dumped from their camera; a disc verify hadn’t been done, and unbeknown to me, it has a read problem with one or two files. Guess what - when cover flow hits them, it crashes the Finder.

Now, good on you for restarting the Finder, but I’d much rather it didn’t crash in the first place. At least my machine is still usable.

Which, incidentally, is more than I can say for Time Machine. It has serious glitches.

Using a directly connected firewire drive, I backed up my machine using Time Machine. And, as I worked, I let it run in the background.

Two problems there.

One, Spotlight appears to be finding things on my backup and on my main drive. Oh, that may sound handy, but not when you’re trying to launch an application. And certainly not when you right click a file and see two copies of things with the Open With… menu.

Two, Time Machine can sometimes take a good moment to backup the system. Especially if you’re using Virtual Machine technologies and your image file changes; that thing is huge. Time Machine dutifully starts to back that up, so I get up to take a break while it does its thing in the background. That causes the machine to fall into sleep mode, and that’s where the real problems begin.

When you wake the machine back up, Time Machine looks like it’s still backup up, but you’ve got just a spinner doing it’s thing. Worse yet, if you go to start any applications, they appear to start, bouncing the icon in the dock, but then nothing happens.

Almost.

According to both top and the Activity Monitor, a process is started, although the desktop doesn’t show any applications. You can see them with Command-Tab, but you can never get the application to come to the foreground. You can’t quit. You can’t force-quit. You can’t get rid of them from the command line using kill, either. Any open applications you have do continue to run, though.

That’s when you discover that your log has crazy reports about messages being sent to selector 0, and then you find out that Apple / Restart… doesn’t work either. Killing tasks with Command-Option-Esc simply reports “Application Not Responding.”

The solution, known to many Unix folks, is to ssh into your machine from another system, and issue the sudo shutdown -r +0 command. That does work. It also gives the illusion everything was just fine on shutdown, so Apple doesn’t get an error report.

However, don’t use Time Machine, and all is well with the world.

Concluding Thoughts
Does any of this worry me?

No.

I’m certain that other users are experiencing the same thing and deducing what causes the behavior, and that everyone is filling out the report-this-problem-to-Apple dialogs that appear.

Most certainly, Apple with issue a patch or two, and by 10.5.1 or 10.5.2, all will be well, and applications will come out with minor updates to fix problems. All will be well soon enough, and each of these problems will get addressed.

While minor bumps are expected with any major new release, this is certainly a much better experience than what happened with us and Vista.

I’m sticking with OS X 10.5 to ride it out, but to my Mac friends and followers without solid Unix experience, I’d say don’t let go of 10.4 just yet. One more pass from Apple’s magic wand is still needed.

ASIDE: Third Party App Problems Encountered So Far
SnapZ Pro is using CGSCreateCString, CGSCreateBoolean, CGSReleaseObj, and CPSPostKillRequest; these are obsolete and degrades system performance.
Parallels is using a forked process, when it should be using exec().
Firefox is reporting memory deallocation issues.
Version Tracker Pro crashes when it quits.

UPDATE 27-NOV-2007: Well, those smaller icons have grown on me. I’m liking them now, and before where they just sat there, I’m using them more often. Booting still seems a bit slower, but realistically, I don’t now, and never did, really have to reboot the Mac.

Furthermore, as I write this, 10.5.1 has come out, as well as many package updates. Version Tracker PRO works fine, Firefox has had an update, as have a number of utilities. I’d have to sat the Mac is quite usable and stable.

My recommendation is not to do an Update, but either an Archive and Install, or a migration from another machine/backup. This seems to clear things up quite well.

A lot of people seem to be treating this as a bash the OS post. It’s not. It required some serious digging to find stuff that was a little off. Unlike Vista, which instantly tried my patience and provoked my anger for many months.

Shortly after Apple announced the price drop on an existing iPhone product, without introducing a new one to take its place, I wrote about whether or not early iPhone adopters would get screwed. My take on the matter was, no, as Apple has a history of doing the right thing, at least in the long run.

Near the same time, a few people observed that the terms and conditions of their American Express card benefits would allow them a refund. Since it never hurts to go directly to the source and just ask, I did so, writing about my experience with American Express. Again, my take on the matter was that American Express, with no ultra compelling requirement to do could turn this into a massive marketing strategy right before the holiday season.

I learned two things.

First, I learned that there’s actually only a small number of rude people who don’t actually read posts before feeling they have to comment in the most vile language as they make false assumptions. (I’d clearly stated in a colorful sidebar box that I didn’t feel entitled to the refund, but that the opportunity could be used to build good will.)

Second, I learned that American Express came to the same conclusions I did about how to treat its customers.

Today I got a letter from American Express. In it, they explained that my recent purchase did not fall within the normal terms and provisions of the Purchase Protection Plan. However, as they value my business, they are processing the claim as an exception to the rule, and are crediting my card with $105. (They then sent me the actual terms, which covered a lot more than I was aware of.)

That made me, as a customer, feel special. And cared about.

With Steve Jobs’s refund of $100, with American Express’s refund of $105, I’m now $5 ahead.

I think American Express was smart.

They knew the product could have been returned completely, giving them a useless product, and me $300. And with my $100 from Jobs, I could have gotten a replacement phone.

They knew what I really would have liked, in the ideal case, was the $200 difference.

They most certainly knew that I’d be getting a refund of $100 from Apple, so they could just get away with providing $100 out of the kindness of their hearts.

And, but going $5 over that amount, which is trivial to them, it makes them look like the super good guys. The $5 bought a lot in terms of marketing.

At this point, as a customer, I’m so totally impressed with how well American Express took care of me, especially when they didn’t have to, that I’ll be using American Express for every major purchase, as well as now minor ones.

Prior to this I used Discover (for cash back) and Visa (when Discover wasn’t accepted).

American Express - you’ve won my heart this holiday season. Thank you.