Say No to Geek Squad Optimization on your new Mac

by Phil Olin
Sunday December 7, 2008

Say No to Geek Squad Optimization on your new Mac

by Phil Olin on December 7, 2008

If your closest Apple store is several hours away, I feel for you, but you have a few other places you can get one. If you have a local Best Buy, you can pick one up there, for the same price as at an Apple store.

I was looking through the Sunday ads today, and noticed a Mac Optimization package on the Mac page. For $40, you can get your new Mac optimized by Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Now I’ve been using Macs all my life, and unlike PCs, I’ve never had to “optimize” it right out of the box. I’ve done other things, like remove printer drivers and unneeded languages, but that’s about it.

Besides, when you first get your Mac, you’ll want to enjoy the great opening Welcome movie. If you let Best Buy “optimize” it, you won’t get to enjoy that. But to top it off, unless something has significantly changed, the Geek Squad knows nothing about Macs [Ed: A little research shows that they don’t know much about PCs as well]. I had a roommate in college that worked at a Geek Squad, and still does, and he couldn’t do anything with my iMac, much less optimize it.

If you are about to purchase your first Mac, and happen to do it at Best Buy, please do not purchase their optimization. If you are having any problems or need any help setting up your new Mac, I can point to you many places to help, Smoking Apples being one of them. Oh, and if you need anything, our number is genius@ourdomain.com.

Tagged as: best buy, geek squad, help, Tips

Reader Comments

Dile NO a la optimización del Geek Squad | Mac User Boricua: December 12, 2008 at 4:57 pm

Reader Comments

mac guy in Vancouver December 8, 2008 at 12:10 am: I’ve had the pleasure of fixing machines after geek squad was done with them. From my experience they do more damage than good. I had one client who had hired Geek Squad bring me his machine after they replaced his hard drive with a larger one. not only would the machine not boot after the drive swap but the machine came to me with a little bag of screws they could not figure out where to put them. They had put screws where they did not belong and forgotten others.hmmm… The data swap was so messed up it had to be redone from the original drive, looks like they just dragged and dropped the data expecting that to create a bootable drive.

The client was pisssed that they had paid for this service then had to pay me to do it all over again. At least it worked and there were no “extra” screws when i was done.
Andrew December 8, 2008 at 12:38 am theremainsofaliving.com: Yeah i have had the same thing happen to some of my church members. Many of them are old and don’t know anything about computers. Many of them have taken their computers to the GEEKS and come back with their computer not functioning properly. I don’t know who does the hiring there but they must hire idiots who know nothing about pcs and then train them to break computers just so the people will go back to them to get it fixed again. I have fixed so many computers that have come back from the geek squad that it is pathetic. I don’t even know if I would let the teenie-boppers at the apple store touch one of my macs.
ralph December 8, 2008 at 10:45 am: The basic principle of life is that the smart geeks go and do amazing things, while the dumb idiots (who are usually trashed on forums) join the geek squad. I wouldn’t opt for the optimisation even if they offered it for free.

And the Welcome video? Saucy!
Kaisar December 8, 2008 at 4:28 pm: Rightly said. Geek squad is a freaking joke. There have been so many times when a PC, forget Mac, has been buggered up by those nuts that I think the FCC or whatever should just ban them.