I purchased the ePub version of this book over the Easter weekend for $8.99 (the original asking price on Amazon), and while it's interesting to a point it's also extremely short, coming in around 47 pages. The author reduced the price to $4.99 which is easier to swallow given the extremely short length of the book, but even after a 45% price drop this is still more of a $2.99 read in my opinion.
Edit: Looks like he's finally dropped it to $2.99 which is where it should have been from day one. Regardless of the price it's just not a good book though, it's not even a book really, it's more like a long pamphlet.
The book is basically a collection of short 2-3 page anecdotes from the author's time as an Apple Store genius from 2006 - 2008. The stories are somewhat interesting but nothing shocking or particularly revealing. Mostly along the lines of "one day, a customer came in with such and such problem" type stories. Don't expect any sort of behind the scenes revelations (except what the Genius room looks like in the back of the store), just a recounting of various events during the job. You don't really get a sense of what it's like to work at an Apple store, you just get an idea of the sort of technical issues they need to address on a day to day basis. The stories don't contain much depth, and being so brief it would be hard to provide any. I kept waiting for the stories to get really interesting, but they never really did. It seemed to me that this was the best the author could come up with and that there wasn't much else to say.
When the author begins the book asking several questions that he feels might typically be asked of a former Apple Store employee (Did you get free stuff? Did you know about products before they were announced? Did you ever get an email from Steve?), you assume that at some point they'll all be answered and yet they never are. It's almost as though the book is positioned at the beginning as an insiders look at what it's like to work at Apple, then he never mentions these things again.
The author certainly could have taken more time to flesh out the stories and perhaps give additional background as to how he ended up in the Genius position, what it was actually like to work for Apple, how working at the Apple Store was better than working in the same sort of role elsewhere. I found the content too sparse in its writing and lacking depth. The author at times comes across as childish (he destroyed a randomly buzzing defective iPhone with a crowbar because it was annoying him), or hot headed (contemplating punching a coworker in the face because she was impolite in front of a customer), while at other times being genuinely caring and trying do what he could to help someone in need. Unfortunately, this collection of anecdotes fails to deliver the "behind the scenes" content I was hoping for, instead simply describing a set of random and unassociated encounters with a variety of customers, much like anyone in a support role would.
It only took me about 20 minutes to read the book and to be honest it wasn't terribly interesting. Maybe it's because I work in a technical support role, so much of what the author relates in his stories just seems like normal day to day stuff to me. Or maybe it's just the reality that working at the Genius bar and dealing with defective or damaged hardware doesn't make for particularly compelling reading. Sure, you can chuckle over the college student who urinated on someone's MacBook, or perhaps grimace at the story of the Mac tower full of dead roaches, but again the stories just don't have enough depth to make them interesting and they're over too quickly. There's seldom any follow-up where there could have been. What was the result of him smashing the defective iPhone? Did he get reprimanded? Did the inventory guys just laugh it off and alter the records for that return? What did the store manager think, or did he/she even know?
It's more like reading a collection of 13 blog posts on the same subject, collected together into a digital book. I'm not sure what I expected, but I don't think this was it.
