Hours of Daylight – 9:38

So Annette and I traveled down to the Apple Store – Mall of America last night and bought a new laptop. She elected to get the new aluminum 15 inch models. It has a faster chip than my 17 inch that i bought several months ago.

I’d like to set the record straight: i am and have been a huge fan of Apple computers since the first Macintosh hit the stores back in 1984, but I am in no way a fan of their business practices nor their pricing structure.

Furthermore, their stores may be a veritable cathedral of hip technology, but don’t let it fool you, it’s just retail, and retail is a scummy business.

We arrived at the newly remodeled store in the evening. The Maul, as i like to call it, was relatively quiet. The Apple Store had browsers in it, but no lines at the registers. We walked straight up to one of the sales geeks and told our story. We quickly learned that despite the fact we were about to spend over $2,500 we were not going to leave completely happy.

First there is the RAM situation. The retail store, we were told, does not rearrange RAM, it just sells it and installs it. The laptop we were buying ships with two 256mb chips occupying the two slots. If you want one 512mb chip you can get it, but you’ll leave with the original chips in your pocket and no break in the price. So, you can configure a laptop via the website with one 512mb chip (for an additional $90), but you cannot make the same arrangement at the store.

Then there is the question of OS. I asked the lead geek, “does this ship with OS 10.3 installed?”

“Uh, no, i don’t think so, but it should have the 10.3 disks in the box. When you get home just run the installer first thing and you’ll be up a running in no time.”

Annette, who was already a bit disappointed at the RAM issue, spoke up, “we’re going to open the box and take a look.”

After completing the sale we went over to the annoyingly named “genius bar” and opened up the snazzy box. No 10.3 to be found. Seeing as how there were no “geniuses” at the bar Annette went around back, shoved some stuff out of the way to find an outlet, plugged in the adaptor, and we started her new computer up. It took a while to boot, but once it got going we were pleased to find no stuck or dead pixels on the screen.

Eventually a genius showed up and Annette got right in his face, “why is 10.3 not included… and why do i have to pony up an additional $20 to get it?”

“Well, it should be included, but in this case it wasn’t.”

“You have hundreds of copies of the OS sitting on the shelves, you admit it should be in here, but can’t just hand me one off the shelf?”

“No, those are packaged for individual sale, we cannot give them out.”

I’m sorry, but given the “level” of retail we’re at here (akin to a Mercedes dealership) i strongly believe that once the missing OS was discovered the clerk-geek at the register should have reached behind him and pulled a copy off the shelf with no hesitation or discussion. It was patently insulting when the “genius” at the bar suggested we come back Saturday or Sunday because they would be giving away a copy of 10.3 every hour. Hey! spend a fortune, then come back and waste a day while you try your luck to “win” something that should have been included right from the start!

Bottom line, we left with our purchase, but it was nowhere near the experience it could have been. Retail is retail… the customer is just a host for their money. Get the money no matter what. If the customer points out an unfairness tell them there’s nothing you can do, it’s store policy.