Fly-By-Night iPod-iPhone Repair Startups Can’t Keep Their Hands Off Off Our Images

I fancy myself to be a pretty good photographer, but I’m NOT winning any awards or anything like former MacMedic Evan Bishop (If you’re looking for a GREAT Professional Photographer in San Diego, CA, please do look him up). As an amateur photog, I take a fair amount of of the pictures here at MacMedics. One of my images has been repeatedly ripped off for use by other iPhone service firms.

Why do less scrupulous iPhone/iPod service concerns keep ripping this image off? Well, here’s the reason: In order to take a picture of the highly reflective iPhone (shooting directly at the iPhone glass), you have to jump through some hoops to get the cracks to show up in focus. We then “lightly” edited the image of the broken iPhone in Photoshop to show off the cracks and make the image really “ad worthy”. We actually put quite a bit of work into just this one picture!

There’s quite an abundance of these “Fly-By- Night” businesses operating in the dark, murky waters of the Internet. A favorite place to hang up a shingle seems to be on-line classified giant, Craigslist. In most of the postings I’ve seen, there’s no website and no physical address to visit. So in essence, you’re going to hire a guy off Craigslist, who’s not part of a long-term reputable business, and invite him to your house to fix your iPhone? You might as well just wander over to your closest open-air drug market to see if you can find some small electronics repair help. Okay I’m sure that some of these guys are just trying to break into the biz, but really folks, people have been killed by people they have hired from Craigslist (and other on-line classified ads services).

If the repair you have done has a problem, do you really think this guy will come back and re-fix the problem? Where are his parts coming from? Are they real deal or just “high copy” foreign counterfeit replacement parts that came from eBay?

In the long run, do you really want some guy who ripped off his advertising artwork from someone else working on your iPod or iPhone?

In the case mentioned in this Blog post, the Craigslist poster did not even bother to try and crop our logo out! I guess that might be good for us, as it’s advertising for MacMedics. Here’s a link to a large size picture of the Craigslist ad posting so you can get a close look at our logo.

Here’s a link to another instance of the SAME image being ripped off by someone else from a previous post about this topic from the MacMedics Blog.

Update 6/26/11: MacMedics is hiring for both Baltimore, MD AND Washington, DC offices.

Are you looking for a new Macintosh tech support job in the Washington, DC Metro area? Are you stuck in a cubicle support job with little to no Mac excitement? Do you love fixing Macs? How about helping people who use their Macs for professional graphic design? Do you still have all of your old Macs networked together and bound to active directory in your basement? Did you hard-wire your iPod directly into the dashboard of your car? Do you have an iPod for every occasion? Were you the first person in line at the Apple Store when Snow Leopard was released? Do you regularly stump the folks at the Apple Genius bar? Do you have an Apple tattoo? Does your Macintosh start your coffee maker full of organic, free trade brew in the morning with the help of Apple’s Automator? If this sounds like your modus operandi, then we’d love to hear from you!

MacMedics (an Apple Authorized Service Provider & Apple Authorized Value Added Reseller), an award-winning regional Macintosh consulting and service company, with offices in Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia is seeking more on-site Macintosh engineers to join our Washington, DC service and support team. As a MacMedics Macintosh Consultant/Engineer, you will be directly involved in providing and recommending Macintosh service and solutions for our thousands of on-site Macintosh clients. Some of the markets we service are; graphic design freelancers, small graphic design studios, large scale advertising agencies, in-house advertising departments, commercial printers, video production houses, colleges, universities, as well as federal, state, and local government agencies.

The functions of this position would include: on-site Macintosh hardware and software consulting and troubleshooting, networking, cross platform integration, and backup & server configuration. Qualified individuals must have EXTENSIVE knowledge of Mac OS X (OS 9 is helpful too!) and long-term experience with the Macintosh product line with a strong emphasis on the use, configuration, and troubleshooting of graphic design applications. Experience with Quark, Photoshop, InDesign, and font management is absolutely essential!

A strong compensation package with performance incentives, a Macintosh MacBook computer, company paid high-speed Internet access and Apple iPhone (with plan) are all provided. Other valuable benefits such as company paid Apple and Adobe technical training and certification; low-cost heath/dental insurance and a 401k plan with company matching are also included.

If you’re interested in being part of a well-established consulting company and making new and exciting and things happen, you’ll love working with MacMedics! Our service team members are focused on helping our customers and doing whatever it takes to do so. If you’re being held back, finding yourself doing more Windows work that you were planning on, tired of red tape and politics, and you want your efforts and contributions to count for something, then this position would be perfect for you! If you’re an under-appreciated/under-paid Mac fanatic, then MacMedics is where you need to be!

If you’re a current or former Apple Store Genius and you’re investigating on how to take your Macintosh support career to the next level, we’d love to speak to you. We offer a wide range of different types of Macintosh work (hardware, software, servers, iPods, iPhones, back up systems, large store devices, Xsan, and data recovery) without the crazy retail hours, or having to eat in the mall everyday.

http://www.macmedics.com/jobs

Please e-mail resume and cover letter to jobs @ macmedics.com.

We would like to welcome our friends and colleagues from the Reston Town Center Apple Store to the Washington DC Macintosh community! Good luck with your grand opening today.

Need directions? Here’s the link to Google Maps.