Lately the home button of my iPhone 4 hasn’t worked perfectly. Sometimes it didn’t work at the first try and I had to push it again, harder, to make it work. A bit of a nuisance especially for double-click actions such as accessing iPod controls with the phone locked, or seeing which apps are running. All in all just a nuisance, nothing to lose sleep for though.

However, I went to the Apple Store and one of the guys recommends to restore the software, because what looked like a hardware issue may have well been a software one. So did I. But the software restore didn’t fix the problem. So today I made an appointment at the Genius Bar and after work I went there to see if they could do anything to ease my slight annoyance.

Well, the software was ok and therefore I believe it’s been judged a hardware issue covered under warranty, so to my utter incredulity I ended up getting a replacement for my phone because of that minutia! In just over 15 minutes I entered the shop, spoke to a very competent and kind chap, got a new phone for free, asked a couple of extra things and off I went. Now, if that’s not the best customer care (I’d nearly say customer “over care”) I don’t know what else it could be.

And while I was waiting for my new phone I was contemplating the size and finishings of the Covent Garden store. Boy, that must cost a fortune to run and maintain. But that’s perfectly in line with the top quality (and sense of coolness) you get when you buy an Apple product. Oh yeah, I haven’t been much of a fan boy lately (and I easily coped with a Dell running Windows 7 as my new work setup), but now I’m again a happy, grinning, loyal Apple fan boy. You gotta love this company and their ethos.

I may watch the epic Pirates of Silicon Valley yet again to celebrate that. Or perhaps not, too late.