Once the iPhone has cooled off, use it less often for about a day. What to do after a “thermal event”: Overheating phones are common in summertime. Note: It might take as long as two minutes to work. This will perform a “force” restart of your device. Unresponsive iPhone or iPad: Hold down both the sleep/wake and menu buttons simultaneously. “You’re paid to be the face of Apple, a happy person who’s there to help people solve their problems, and that’s fun, but it’s also draining.”īefore making an appointment, first try these easy possible solutions: To decompress after his shift was over, Epperson would go home, go to his room and not talk to anyone. Few customers realize that Geniuses have asked “Hi, how are you? Are you having a good day?” maybe a hundred times on any given day. “While everyone thinks of Geniuses as tech people-and they are-it’s also a super-social job,” he says. Secondly, keeping calm can be a challenge. It not only means the problem will take longer to fix, but it also drains the resources of the team. Firstly, the biggest pressure Geniuses feel is not wanting to make a mistake or misdiagnose a repair. While Epperson loved his time at Apple, he says the job can be difficult for a couple of reasons. “I’ve seen this happen at the Genius Bar where a girl will come in with her boyfriend who’s all ‘I built a computer from scratch one time using a toothpick.’ And you’re like, ‘Cool story! But this is the context of the situation, and these are the tools I have.’” Ultimately, having an outside “expert” hovering overhead will just gum up the process and make your repair take longer. Leave your computer expert friend at homeĮverybody has the boyfriend, the cousin or the uncle who knows everything about computers.

“If you own a computer, you need to understand what your data is, and the proper ways to keep that data, should something happen to it.” So whether it’s on an external drive by using Apple’s Time Machine backup feature or remote backup through iCloud, make sure your data is duplicated.Ĥ. Going back to the car analogy, “if you own a car, you do an oil change,” says Epperson. “To be frank, it’s not the responsibility of anyone but you to have protected your data,” he says. In these instances, all the data on the device is lost. Apple users frequently come into the store without backing up their phone or computer’s hard drives, and the only fix to the problem is factory restoring the device. If Epperson had just one tip, this would be it. “There’s tricks to keeping everybody on time, but really as a customer you’re shoving yourself into a system that revolves around a schedule.” “Each Genius, if they’re working on computers, they’re seeing an appointment every 15 minutes, and then they’re taking a mobile appointment-an iPhone or iPad problem-every 10 minutes.” says Epperson. As you might expect from Apple, there’s an art and science around how the company schedules its Genius appointments.

By not having to sit, wait, and watch others get helped ahead of you, it helps to alleviate a major frustration of getting tech support-all the time it can take. If it’s at all possible to make an appointment in advance, you should. It’s their job to direct you to the best person on the floor for your particular need. The person (or people) on point are typically positioned by the doors, have an iPad in their hands, and have their heads up as they look around for customers to help. Regardless of whether you need help buying or fixing a computer, start with the “person on point”-especially because if you try getting assistance from another staffer, they’re just going to lead you back to one of these workers anyway. “It’s better to look at an Apple Store more like a car dealership, due to the fact that it has a retail section where you can buy technology, but it also has a very large service department, which is what the Genius Bar really is,” says Epperson. So the next time something goes wrong with your Apple gear, keep his tips in mind: When I interviewed former Genius Aaron Epperson, a two-and-a-half year Apple Store veteran who left the company about a year ago, and asked what he wished customers knew before they came in for help, he had plenty of suggestions. That doesn’t mean they don’t have plenty of battle stories. The people staffing Apple’s Genius Bar, the company’s in-store customer support center, seem like an affable lot.

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