Although I have plenty of reasons to hate as an Apple owner and developer, this is one of the weakest really.

I mean who would have believed that the company with a highly controlled walled garden, strongly unified design and best of its class user experience would have their lightly trained post-sales support engineers given the most advanced training in managing customer psychology and expectations? 
Although the manual is certainly repellent to human dignity given that it is a sales manual after all, which is what is setting you off I think, it sounds like they are solving problems efficiently for free. Though I have no experience at the Genius Bar (and I really detest the name) I have yet to see proof that they are “using euphemisms to distract from problems rather than fixing them”.
That said it is also plenty true that “issues” and “stops responding” are in fact the correct terms a professional developer would want to use. If the application dies and the crash feedback dialog appears then you can say fatal crash or whatever. Most of my mac issues happen when I am overloading the system (maybe with crashplan, antivirus, opening many huge images, using up RAM, etc.) that otherwise I would expect the very enjoyable and competent Mac OS X to handle perfectly, like say BeOS seemed to do with a lighter workload. 

Now some good reasons to hate might be when your Mom tries to upgrade her iMac to the latest OS and instead gets her system trashed, or when hard disk dies she loses her apps despite having Time Machine, or when you get stuck on New Years trying to copy songs onto a child’s iphone, or their trashing of the Apple ///, or suing rivals to keep them out of the market, or making OS improvements focus on social networking, or making a CEO a saint, you know the usual seething anger targets. Grrr! But telling salespeople to tone down their language and smile luminescently at all times is not on the top of my grudge list.

We were sent to Cupertino for 2 weeks to practice repairs and get certified. There was also a mock Genius Bar where we practiced different situations that came up from a “what to do when x happens” stand point.

Actually working there had nothing to do with sales. You worked 75% of the time on the bar, and the other 25% in the back doing repairs. We had massive lee-way in making the customer happy. I frequently replaced stock, many times when it was out of warranty just to make someones day. Apple knows that happy customers lead to word of mouth and looking at their growth, the cost they lose on giving things away is more than made up by making loyal customers that spread brand awareness.

They had some silly lingo, but in general it was a store full of happy employees making customers happy. 

This is of course where it all comes down to the people skills of each rep.

The worst part is that its true, depending on your language, even with the same outcome, customers will think of your service as good or bad.

There is an art to making customers happy.

Now, if your worried about ethics, it really depends on the outcome, IF you tell your customer what was wrong after you fix the issue, then I see no problems at all with this. But IF you only handwave the problem away, then you might be getting into unethical behaviour. Of course, many times this means that you have to tell the customer that they broke their own machine and they just love to hear that.

Customer service exists to make people with problems a little happier and more likely to keep buying things.  Period.  No retailer would offer any service at all if they could get away with it.  Just look around, in some niches where strong monopolies exist…there’s little to no service at all.

If you want service the sole aim of which is to fix your stuff and “benefit” you, you want to go to a service shop, not a retailer.

Op-ed: Apple Store may be shifting from customer experience to profit machine

When the Disney store first opened in the 90s with their new hires, their speech seemed scripted as well. Once comment or conversation seemed to always shift to a new Disney film just now out int theaters too. Would love to see that training manual.

Last time my Mac fell prey to kernel panics and the like, the Mac technician (not a Genius, this was an authorized dealer in Mexico) started out with the training-speak, then corrected course and ditched the soft language when I talked about “black screen and three beeps, that means RAM”, about testing the RAM chips and slots by switching and running memtest, etc.  We had a very good talk, impatience nowhere to be seen.

Likewise the use of the word ‘bug’. People may install other software that can cause ‘issues’ with the OS. If you start off with the assumption with the idea the OS has a bug then you’ll miss this possibility. Issue is a more accurate term that includes bugs. Consider the question: “Does the bug occur when you log in to another user?” Doesn’t make sense, because if it doesn’t occur then it’s not a bug in the first place. “Does the issue occur?” is better.

In other words, the whole point is to fix the problems. Not as you content to distract from them. 

I assume some people here were Apple customers before they had their own retail channel and before the did online BTO options. Anyone remember what buying a Mac was like before that? You either went to an authorized Mac retailer (which were usually pretty cool) or you went to a big box store like Sears or something like that. The display Macs were usually in a state of total disrepair / vandalization, the sales people knew nothing about them, and there were three trillion models of the same machine from which to choose.

Taking very tight control of their retail presence was a huge piece of Apple’s turn-around and like it or not, the customer has responded.

I have to ask the naysayers, how did you think that Apple created such a unified experience across their stores?