Gregory Todd Williams

Claims made during my recent visit to the Providence Apple Store “Genius” Bar where I sought advice on my MacBook Pro not being able to sleep subsequent to upgrading the operating system to Snow Leopard (instead cycling rapidly between being asleep and awake):

1. No Apple laptop should ever be put to sleep while not connected to an external power source.
2. No Macintosh computer will sleep if any running application is trying to access the network.

After explaining my problems (which included the sleep issue, iSync [which I haven’t seen since 10.4!] starting every few minutes, and screen artifacts), the “genius” tole me that I could damage my laptop by letting it sleep without the external power source plugged in. Putting that aside for now, and insisting that that wasn’t my problem, he had me boot the system and immediately upon seeing several menu bar accessories and many icons on the desktop immediately told me that I had lots of “third party software” installed, that much of it was probably incompatible with Snow Leopard, and that it wasn’t his job to troubleshoot that sort of thing for me. He speculated that VMWare Fusion (which he referred to as Parallels) was causing the problem, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make an attempt to find out if VMWare Fusion was known to cause problems in Snow Leopard.

After pressing hard about not wanting to just be told to go home and make sure all my applications were compatible with Snow Leopard only to discover it was a deeper problem, he gave in and rebooted my system in safe mode. The sleep problem persisted. He then plugged in an external disk and boot the system into what I believe was Snow Leopard (but which he referred to as 10.5) and the sleep problem disappeared.

At this point, he suggested that it was clearly a problem with my “third party applications” (a term he used many, many times as if to suggest that I was somehow out of the mainstream by running any applications not provided by Apple, and the use of which made my seeking technical support a waste of his time), and that a clean install was the solution. He continued to tell me that my laptop wouldn’t ever sleep if any running application were “trying to access the network.” To this last point I told him he was wrong, but he insisted that any application trying to access the network would wake the computer from sleep. Clearly trying to argue this point wasn’t a good use of my time.

As a final attempt to make his point, he started Activity Monitor, and sat watching the CPU usage graph for a couple of minutes and told me that “there’s a lot of programs running for an idle system.” I resorted the process list by CPU usage and pointed out that the only processes which were actively running (and not sleeping) were mdworker, activitymonitord, and kernel_task, all Apple-provided processes. There was not real response to this, he asked what Tweetie was, and then reiterated that I was just going to have to perform a clean install.

By this point I wasn’t confident that my iSync or screen artifact issues could be resolved by spending any more time at the genius bar. So for the time being, I’m stuck having to turn my computer off completely any time I need put it away from more than a few minutes, stuck having to dismiss iSync from trying to connect to a mobile phone which I haven’t used in years, and dreading the reappearance of screen artifacts. This whole experience has soured me a bit on the Genius Bar. I’ve had such great experiences in the past, making this one all the more surprising and frustrating.