Dammit. Apple just announced a new iBook G4. sigh. My iBook (white G3, 500 Mhz, ordered the day that Apple made the iBooks look good) is aging, needs a new battery, and has backlight problems. It's basically become a home machine since there's so little battery life left and the lid/screen basically has to stay open all the time, but it hasn't been a bad thing. But I really want a portable machine again as I ramp up my school schedule, and I estimate that it will take at least $500 just to get my current iBook going. I've been looking at getting an eMac to effectively replace my iBook and iMac (which will be three and four years old, respectively, come spring). But I think I may have to get one of these new iBooks instead, and keep the iMac doing what it's been doing so well.
I just experienced my first ever glitch with the online Apple Store. Last week, I put together an order in the education sub-store, and saved it until monday when I placed it. After placing the order, I noticed that it didn't show up in my Order Status page. I never received any confirmation email. And manually entering the order number I was given in the more direct order status app never yielded a result. (This was made worse when the order status application seemed to go down yesterday). Finally, I noticed that there was no credit card activity surrounding the order either.
So I called the Apple Store for customer service, and it appears the order was a phantom - no shipping/billing or credit card information was saved. After some checking, the customer service representative said it's a good bet that order would never be completed and I could place the order again without worry of double billing (and receiving two of the same product), and that if that did happen, they would willingly take returns and refund on the duplicates.
So I placed the order again this morning, and it immediately showed up in my order status page. Now - it's just countdown until Panther arrives. To be followed by a long-needed firewire hard drive.
Note: This is the only problem I ever had with the Apple Store, and they took care of it quickly once I contacted them. It was just...curious.