Okay, this is a lit­tle ter­ri­fy­ing. While Apple on the one hand does more than any­one else to ensure a great user expe­ri­ence (more on this tomor­row), they simul­ta­ne­ously seem hell-​bent on destroy­ing the cus­tomer experience.

When Apple delayed the inter­na­tional iPad launch by a month, early adopters world­wide started to panic. Since my nearby Apple store ini­tially had plenty of stock, I offered to pur­chase and ship iPads inter­na­tion­ally for mem­bers of the NeoGAF gam­ing forum. I was doing this as a favor, unlike hoard­ers who were unload­ing iPads on eBay to cash in on the $150+ markup. Instead, my ask­ing prices were very rea­son­able, just enough to cover all the tax, inter­na­tional express ship­ping, and Pay­pal fees with a lit­tle left over for gas and my time.

The really dis­turb­ing part is the canned, robotic lan­guage the clerks in the Apple Store are forced to use. I’ve got more infor­ma­tion out of voice recog­ni­tion phone trees. This is exactly the kind of behav­ior Wired founder John Bat­telle called out in his recent open let­ter to Apple, in which he referred to Apple as the Howard Hughes of the indus­try. And not in a good way.

How I went from Apple store new­bie to life­time ban in one week at Pro­to­col Snow