Residential Services

MacAtoZ helps Apple Macintosh users who want a guide and protector in the ever-changing world of technology. We establish long-term relationships with the people we serve via our Sentinel, Guardian, and Ultra programs. Most of our client relationships last not just for years but for a lifetime.  

That’s not for everybody. For people who just want a quick fix or to purchase the latest Apple gizmo, the Apple retail store, BestBuy, or other Apple Authorized Resellers will be happy to help. We don’t sell Apple products. We are not a retail store, and we are not sales-driven. 

Instead, we offer our time and impartial expertise as Apple-certified members of the Apple Consultants Network to ensure that our clients get the best possible help. Although Apple makes a number of terrific products, they also make some clunkers. Apple won’t tell you which ones they are, but we sure will. 

Services

For years, the computer support industry has operated on a “Break-Fix” model: a computer user has a problem, they call a computer consultant, and the consultant comes out and fixes the problem. This is a reactive process, so something that might have been a small problem initially, often ends up as an enormous (and more costly) issue by the time the computer consultant arrives on the scene. If only we could have known about the issue when it first started. With Sentinel, we can!

Sentinel provides monitoring which helps us keep track of your computer’s health and well-being and spot potential issues before they become full-blown problems. To be clear, Sentinel only monitors computer health information. We neither see nor collect personal data. Your privacy and security are crucial to us, and in fact, data preservation is one of the fundamental advantages of Sentinel. When a potential issue is spotted, we alert you via email with specific information about what is happening with your computer, as well as the steps needed to repair the issue at hand.

Guardian includes these Sentinel advantages and also allows us to block malicious websites. Guardian can protect you from malware, filter website content for you by site and/or by category, protect you from phishing attacks via email, and even speed up your web surfing.

Ultra offers everything in Sentinel and Guardian and automatically runs appropriate maintenance routines, complete small system and software updates and patches, scan for and quarantine malware and adware, and more. It’s akin to have your own residential IT department monitoring, securing, and maintaining the health of your Mac.

If you’re in one of our service programs, if you need troubleshooting or training with your Macintosh computer, MacAtoZ can help. We can come to your home, meet you at our office, or assist remotely to get things working again, develop a plan of action, or teach you what you want to know about using your Mac.

Using our services via remote support is particularly cost-effective. With remote support, we can get help to you faster and, because our time is billed in just 5 minute increments of our hourly rate (with a 15 minute minimum) you pay as little as possible for the help you need.

We invite you to review the information about each of our programs (Sentinel, Guardian, and Ultra) and decide which one is the best fit for you. If you’re not sure, please give us a call at 503-507-0410. We’d be happy to talk with you. 

Sentinel | Guardian | Ultra

Sentinel

The MacAtoZ Sentinel program provides 24/7 monitoring of your Apple Macintosh computer’s basic health. If there’s a problem, we’ll notify you immediately so that you can take steps to remedy the problem. That remedy may be as simple as plugging in a Time Machine hard drive (if you’ve forgotten to make a backup in a while) or as serious as having us come out for onsite repair visit. Either way, the good news is that with Sentinel we can finally be proactive and catch problems when they’re small.

Sentinel monitors over 150 data points every hour including:

• Backup systems like Time Machine and Backblaze
• Low disk space on hard drives and SSDs
• Disk input/output (I/O) errors
• Disk SMART errors
• Boot disk selection changes
• Failing laptop batteries
• Kernel Panics
• Faulty RAM
• Unscheduled reboots
• Failed POST tests
• Basic malware detection

When Sentinel detects a problem, we will be notified so that we can do a professional assessment of the situation. This is important, because not every problem is worth worrying about. But if it is worthy of your attention, we will contact you so that we can take steps to resolve the problem.

Sentinel is just $19.99 a month billed to any major credit or debit card. We think Sentinel is an amazing value, and we’re so confident you’ll agree that we offer a free 30-day trial and a 60-day money back guarantee. There’s also no long-term contract, so you’re not locked into anything. You can quit at any time.

Guardian

Guardian gives you the same 24/7 monitoring as Sentinel and adds an incredible layer of security.
Guardian is a four-in-one service:
+Protection from malicious websites.
+Content filtering that you control
+Email phishing protection
+Faster web surfing

The wave of Mac malware keeps growing. Sure, it’s not as awful as on a PC, but it’s an issue.

The best way to stop malware to is stop it before it gets on your Mac which is exactly what Guardian attempts to do. If you try to go to a bad website, Guardian will stop you. That block page has a password so you can bypass the block and go to the site anyway—we’re here to serve you, after all—but you shouldn’t want to. If Guardian tells you it’s a bad site, it’s a bad site.

Because Guardian also categorizes sites, it will let you block entire ranges of sites by category. Parents might want to block Adults Sites for their kids, for example. The control for web site filtering is entirely up to you. And you can block by category or by individual site. (You can also white list sites so that you can see specific sites within otherwise blocked categories.)

Guardian’s ability to block bad websites also protects you from phishing attacks. Phising is an email attempt to get you to go to a bad web site. That email looks like it came from your bank, so you click the link and again it looks like the website is your bank’s. But it’s not. It’s a fake site that exists to steal your financial information. Well, Guardian mitigates this problem. Because Guardian knows it’s a bad site, it will block your attempt to get to it. Guardian saves you from yourself!

Almost as a bonus, Guardian speeds up your web surfing. When you go to a website, say www.apple.com, the first thing that happens is your computer issues a request for the address. Humans might see “apple.com” but computers use numbers, so that number has to be retrieved every time you go to a new site. Guardian uses a high speed index to make this process go faster.

Guardian is just $29.99 a month—about the price of a large pizza. Have a second or third Mac? Add Guardian to additional Macs for just $10 a month each.

Ultra

Ultra gives you the same 24/7 monitoring as Sentinel and all the online security of Guardian. Ultra adds Maintenance and Security services akin to what you’d get at a business. Ultra is designed for home users who want to spend their time using their Mac not updating, fixing, or protecting it.

If you like to tinker with your Mac’s hardware or software, Ultra is not for you. On the other hand, if you want to simply use your Mac without having to update and manage it, Ultra provides 24/7 proactive monitoring, maintenance, and security of your Mac so that you, the home Mac user, can worry less and enjoy more.

Among other things, Ultra runs the appropriate maintenance routines, upgrades system software automatically, scans for and quarantines malware and adware, and more. And it does most of this—system and security updates could be an exception—transparently in the background so that you’re not interrupted in the work you want to do.

Ultra automatic software updates are particularly helpful for a lot of people. So many times users worry about installing updates. Will the update fix problems? Is it safe to install yet? Ultra takes these worries away. We keep your operating system updated, but we hold most updates for 10-14 days first to make sure everything’s working, then we push them out to users. (Security updates are an exception; we typically push those out in 24-48 hours as soon as can determine that Apple’s update is reliable.)

Ultra is just $49.99 a month. Have a second or third Mac? Add Ultra to additional Macs for just $10 a month each.