what can I try out in an apple store?

[mrklaw]

Considering a macbook air, and I'm wondering what I can test out in an apple store to satisfy me it'll do what I need?

eg, can I bring a USB stick with some photos on, and have a try at editing them to check out the screen?

Can I install minecraft as I'm concerned about the capability of the HD3000?

 

[Hellhammer]

You could just upload the photos somewhere or take random photos from the internet. I don't think the Apple Store staff will fancy if you stick your own USB stick or install something on them. You can always ask though.

 

[Comeagain?]

You could just upload the photos somewhere or take random photos from the internet. I don't think the Apple Store staff will fancy if you stick your own USB stick or install something on them. You can always ask though.

But they do wipe them clean every night, so they may not care.

 

[Dowjohnny]

But they do wipe them clean every night, so they may not care.

Obviously not every single night (at least in my nearest store, Munich Germany)

Because there is almost always stupid facetime-pics of customers or typing-test-documents of a couple of days on them..

Maybe they're lazy here

 

[seinman]

I don't know how many stores actually do wipe them nightly, I'm guessing very few. I've spent a lot of time in Apple stores in Chicago, Orland Park IL, Philadelphia, Cherry Hill NJ, and Richmond VA, and none of them do it. I would see facetime photos, browser bookmarks/history, and other assorted things saved on there all the time, and looking at timestamps they were never all from that day. Some weeks old. I'm guessing once a week or even once a month is more the norm; possibly even only when something goes wrong on them.

 

[old-wiz]

You could just upload the photos somewhere or take random photos from the internet. I don't think the Apple Store staff will fancy if you stick your own USB stick or install something on them. You can always ask though.

I took in a USB stick of some Word documents to see how they would work in OSx, and they had no problem with me plugging in the USB stick and experimenting with Pages and Office.

 

[r0k]

I stopped in to the local Apple store, downloaded geekbench and ran it on their systems just to correlate results against published results for each machine. I also did the same with a local retailer that was selling used Macs. I found the result at the local retailer to be a lot lower than published specs and that combined with a "no refunds" policy was enough to make me decide to purchase my apple gear directly from apple, microcenter or best buy and skip the mom and pop shop that sold slower macs without the ability to get a refund if I wasn't happy.

On a MBA, you might find that the only available usb slot is taken up with an anti theft device so you might be better off putting your files in dropbox as long as you don't forget to log out of your dropbox account before walking away from the machine.

I've also found Apple Store employees were happy to log in as an admin so I could log in to my mobile me account to use back to my mac and they were happy to log in again so I could log out when I was done.

 

[mrklaw]

thanks. Dropbox is a good idea. I could possibly also try the browser version of minecraft just for a basic test. Although it looks from benchmarks that if I need a 9600 level performance then the MBP 15" with 6490 is the minimum I should be looking at.