The people at MacEnthusiasts are the best!
Last fall, for a number of reasons, I finally had to make the jump to an Intel Mac, and I wanted a new Mac Pro (mid-2010) that came with native Snow Leopard (I have proprietary software that I need to run for occasional by-the-job extra work, and there are no plans to update it to run in Lion). Those machines were disappearing like crazy at that particular time, and the place where I initially planned to place the order ran out of them before I could finalize the order. A friend of mine is very happy with MacEnthusiasts, so I decided to give them a call. Mathew at MacEnthusiasts came up with the machine I wanted, and I arranged to have a number of modifications done in their shop (a second hard drive, additional RAM, and a conversion kit to give me eSATA connections for my external drives). Mathew negotiated a very competitive price with me, based on what I had originally planned to spend at the place I initially intended to buy, and I left (and remain) a very happy customer. The Mac Pro is great and runs like a top.
A few weeks ago, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a new (early 2011) MacBook Pro on the blowout sale at MacMall. The prices were really good at that time, and while it comes with Lion, the particular model available can be partitioned and Snow Leopard can be run on the second partition, thus solving my software problem. The only caveat is that Snow Leopard has to be installed with the restore disks that would have shipped with the MacBook Pro when it was first produced (in this case OSX 10.6.6) before Apple reworked all of them and put Lion on. I am part of a group of 4 people who were all doing this together, for the same reason. The other 3 bought somewhat earlier in the sale, called Apple Customer Care, and were given the Snow Leopard restore disks for their machines with little or no trouble. I held off buying a little longer for financial reasons, and when I called Apple Customer Care, I was told that Apple would no longer allow me to have the disks. Now I made it clear that I was perfectly willing to pay for the disks, even though the others had been given their disks without charge, but after multiple calls with a "senior tech supervisor," Apple still refused to sell me the disks. My tech guru (and one of the people who had already gotten his disks from Apple) tried calling for me and talked to a supervisor in a different call center, but he got the same answer, Apple refused to sell me the disks. No one knew why the policy had suddenly been changed, but we ran into a brick wall. My personal opinion is that it's just another case of Apple's increasingly fascistic behavior in forcing us forward whether we want to go or not, and with no acknowledgement of the fact that some of us have needs that Lion doesn't fill. (And frankly, after playing around with Lion on the new MacBook Pro, I have no interest in it at all.) Apple seems to be determined to throw its pro users under the bus. (And this is coming from a former Mac evangelist!)
Well, you can imagine how frustrated I was at this point. After watching the other 3 people in our group get their disks from Apple, and after paying Apple a considerable amount of money for 2 new computers in 9 months, they refuse to sell me a couple of $16 disks?!! Heck, the MacBook Pro, even though it had Lion installed, still came in a Snow Leopard-labeled box!
I decided to give Mathew at MacEnthusiasts a call, just on the off chance that maybe they could help me get the disks. I was embarrassed to do it, since I didn't even buy the MacBook Pro from him, but I was desperate. Mathew was great. He never even mentioned that I didn't buy the MacBook Pro from him. He just assured me that they would do their best to help me, and as a last resort, they could install Snow Leopard for me (only a last resort because that would have left me without restore disks in the future in case I ever had to reinstall the operating system). It took a few days, during which Mathew kept trying to come up with ways to get me the disks, but last Friday, Jeff from the tech department called to say that they had finally pried a set of disks away from Apple, and I could come and pick them up. Not only did they get the disks I so badly needed, but because Apple did not charge them for the disks, MacEnthusiasts didn't charge me for them either! Now that's what I call incredible customer service!!
The happy end of this story is that both of my Macs are now set up exactly as I need them to be to do the work I need to do, and it is thanks entirely to MacEnthusiasts. (And no thanks to Apple!) read more