So I went to the Apple store today to pick up a second new keyboard. One for work. Yes I love them.
While I was there I thought I would check out a Canon HV20, and see how imovie was working with HDV. While I was wandering around I overheard this:
random store patron: So what browser do macs use? store idiot: Safari. It’s the same thing as firefox RSP: Yah SI: Yeah it’s actually the same application. They use the same technology, Safari is just the mac version.
Ouch. Now Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine, and Safari uses a modified version of KHTML called webkit. Store monkey should have known this. But I wouldn’t have faulted him for not knowing it if he hadn’t just spewed random crap off the top of his head. Just say “It ships with Safari, but you can download a bunch of other browsers if you’d like, including firefox.” I’m not sure if he was just talking out of his ass, and making it up, or if he really believes that Safari uses Gecko as its rendering engine. I would consider this kind of knowledge pretty basic for an Apple store employee.
So I finally get someone to help me out. I just needed a firewire 6-4 pin cable to try out the camera. He says, “oh I’ll get you a USB cable.” No monkey. I didn’t ask for a USB cable. As far as I know, no camera will transport standard def video over USB, let alone HDV. He says “yeah imovie will recognize video over usb now!” Umm okay, whatever. I suspect he’s seen small clips pulled over from a SD card, but I’ll play along. He says “I’ll bring both cables”
He comes back with only a USB cable. How strange, iMovie doesn’t see any video coming over the USB port. Weird. Get me a firewire cable monkey boy.
With FW, iMovie plays nice with HDV, but even on the 17″ macbook pro, the video on screen lagged behind real life by at least 2 seconds, and it took over 5 minutes to export 10 seconds of video pulled from the camera. Painful.
So in case you were wondering, the Apple stores are full of dumbasses now.
Addendum: There were 2 Mac Pros in the whole store. There was a whole section dedicated to the fucking AppleTV. How that is a good idea is completely beyond me. Margin on the towers is through the roof. Margin on the AppleTV: Not so much.
There were a metric shit ton of iMacs. They were everywhere. Kids stations were already converted to the new iMacs.
There was not one video camera actually hooked up to any of the machines.
Store was full of honkeys. There were a million of them. People at checkout didn’t look like they knew how to ring people out. There was a long line to check out as a result.