A few days ago, we ran a story, sourced from Charles Arthur and The Overspill, titled Beware taking your Mac running High Sierra to the Genius Bar: APFS might surprise them.

In a nutshell, Charles talks through taking his MacBook Pro, running macOS High Sierra, to the Apple Store for repair, and having his hard drive wiped because the tech did not detect that the drive was formatted as APFS.

As follow up to this, I spoke with a number of Apple Store employees, curious to see if this was a one-off situation, specific to one Apple Store, or if this was a hole in the system.

A few quotes:

Geniuses are required to take tests about all new hardware and software once it’s released. This is driven from the top at corporate. APFS is not news to Geniuses. Sometimes overly eager Technical Specialists or Technical Experts are allowed to take Mac appointments and APFS may be news to them.

And:

100% of the Geniuses I’ve worked with know about APFS.

And, in reference to the store manager contacting Charles and wanting feedback:

Managers almost always call when people fill out those surveys and indicate they had a negative experience or something went wrong. Apple’s deep concern for customer service is one of the things I love the most about the company.

The strongest takeaway from all this? Apple Geniuses really know their stuff and care about Apple. Small sample size, perhaps, but that’s what it feels like to me when I visit a store.

I’d also say, if you are at an Apple Store and things start going south, consider asking if the person helping you might be willing to bring someone else in to offer an opinion. The goal would be to escalate the problem without hurting anyone’s feelings. To me, this situation with Charles should not have happened.