I just got off the phone with Apple Store. I needed an update and someone to talk to after days of frustration while waiting for my PowerBook to show up. I have received quiet a few of those “Apple order updates” telling me how sorry they are and that they will send me the lean-mean-monster-machine in the first, than the third and last time, the second week of October.
I felt I needed an qualified explanation after observing the Slashdot-thread stated that OS X 10.3 Panther was due to be released the 24th of October. Does my machine get this preinstalled? Do I have to pay full price for this new must-have OS?
First, the nice person at Apple kindly explained me that my machine still was at the assembly-line in Taiwan. Great. And without telling me, I understood that it wasn’t much he could do to make them work harder or escalate my order. The delay was caused by some lack of airport components, he was told.
When I asked him about the release of Panther and the fact that my very delayed order still wasn’t shipped (preloaded with an soon-to-be-obsolete OS), he said that my package would contain an upgrade-ticket I could use to order Panther only for the price of shipment ($20 or NKR 140,-).
As all Apple releases, things are kept very tight until release-date, so I just had to wait until my package arrived and then do the Panther-order when I had my PowerBook serial-number in front of me. He calmed me with the phrase that “this order wouldn’t take that long since all this DVD’s would be available throughout the Apple Store chain in good time before the release date”. Yeah, right. I can’t wait to get my hold on this thing.