Report: Apple to target small businesses with new technical support service

By Aemon Malone February 28, 2011

Apple over the weekend began prepping its retail store employees for the launch of a new enterprise service plan geared towards small businesses, according to AppleInsider. Joint Venture, as it’s being called, will offer small businesses a customized version of its Genius support system.

Customers who purchase a Mac for their business will be offered the service for a $500 annual fee. Up to five Apple systems will be covered under the plan, with more able to be added for an additional annual fee of $99.

While details of the service have yet to be made official, here’s a quick rundown of what the Joint Venture package is expected to include:

Priority Genius bar support at Apple retail stores
Access to Apple’s corporate technical support lines
15-inch Macbook Pro “loaners” — with iWork and Microsoft pre-installed — when repairs take longer than 24-hours
A personal data transfer service
Group training sessions (up to three per year and limited to eight people per session)

Apple will reportedly unveil Joint Venture on March 2 — the same day of anticipated iPad 2 unveiling — with the tag line: “Get Setup. Get Trained. Keep Running.” Apple is expected continue to offer its AppleCare and One to One plans in addition to Joint Venture.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Computing

How to customize mouse gestures on Mac

Apple Magic Mouse on a desk.

Did you know that you can still pull off gestures and haptic tricks with a Mac computer, even without a touchscreen? Such feats are possible, just as long as you own an Apple Magic Mouse. Far more than a sleek-looking desk accessory, the Magic Mouse functions much like a MacBook trackpad. Taps, long presses, swipes, and pinches (among other actions) deliver a number of results, and you’ll be able to customize these commands, too.

Computing

How to delete or hide chats in Microsoft Teams

Running Microsoft Teams on the Galaxy Tab S8.

Microsoft Teams is a terrific workplace platform for keeping the camaraderie strong. Featuring collaborative messaging, video conferencing, and file-sharing tools, it’s your one-stop-shop for in-office, hybrid and at-home workers alike. But anyone with a long history of using Teams will tell you how clogged up your message stockpile can get. Fortunately, deleting and hiding these exchanges is relatively easy to do, and we’ve put together this guide to help.

Computing

Why Llama 3 is changing everything in the world of AI

Meta AI on mobile and desktop web interface.

In the world of AI, you've no doubt heard about what OpenAI and Google have been up to. And now, Meta's Llama LLM (large language model) is becoming an increasingly important player in the game, especially with its open-source nature. Meta recently made a big splash with the launch of its Llama 3 AI model, and it's shaken up the field dramatically.

The reasons why are multiple and varied. It's free to use, it has a wide user base, and yes, it's open source, to name but a few. Here's why Llama 3 is taking the AI industry by storm and may shape its future for some time to come.
Llama 3 is really good
We can debate until the cows come home about how useful AIs like ChatGPT and Llama 3 are in the real world -- they're not bad at teaching you board game rules -- but the few benchmarks we have for how capable these AI are give Llama 3 a distinct advantage.