A Plea to Apple
11th Sept 2008
Dear Mr Jobs
or can I call you Steve? Please let me introduce myself, my name is Terry Blakey, I am a 54 year old IT engineer and a long time Apple user, in fact I have been using Macs since I bought my first Performa 5200 back in 1993. In that time I have lost count of the number of people I have evangelized to and converted to Apple. Even now, I am writing this on my new MacBook Pro, the one I bought to replace my 9 month old MacBook which I sold on to a young man as his first Mac and who is now another Mac convert (you’re very welcome Steve). I even have a iMac G5, an old PowerBook G3 and a couple of iPods, and if you look at my email address you will see I even have a .mac (now MobileMe) account. I tell you all this to establish that I am a true Apple supporter and not some ‘Johnny-come-lately’.
Now to the reason for writing this letter. This morning I downloaded iTunes 8. You know? The one that gives me the nice Genius bar! This is something I could find really useful, if only you would allow me to use it. You see there is a problem. I live in the EU, (that’s the collection of countries over the other side of the big puddle they call the ATLANTIC OCEAN). Now you may say “Hey, what’s the problem, we cover the EU”, but unfortunately for me you don’t. At least not the bit I have chosen to retire to - the island of Cyprus. In this forgotten land I have an Apple dealership (of sorts) but no access to the Apple store, no downloads of iTunes music, no album purchases, no album covers, no genius bar support. Neither can I buy an iPhone (which I would dearly love - in fact I want 2, I even have the money put aside), I can’t even buy one somewhere else and take it home with me, you’ve made sure of that. And when I try to find an email address that I can write to about all this, guess what, there isn’t one!
I tried to fool the system this morning. I am currently consulting in Qatar and when I found Qatar on the list of countries where I CAN register for the Apple store I immediately selected it. Sadly the page then came back in Arabic (which I don’t read) with no option to select English - maybe you’ve run out of Geniuses, you certainly didn’t employ one on this page.
Anyway, I’d just like to ask you to kick a little butt here and there and find out why my little full member EU independent island state is not supported, or at least have the common courtesy to explain to me the reasons why not. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, especially coming from such a loyal follower, you might even call it a little gratitude for all the support I’ve shown you, even through the bad times.
But maybe you really don’t care. You know I’ll go on using Macs and iPods etc. because that’s the way I am, loyal to end, why do you need to do anything? Maybe you finally did learn something from Microsoft after all.
Go on, prove me wrong, I’ll be waiting.
Yours in eager anticipation.
Terry Blakey
Cyprus
Source: terryblakey
