Round and Round The Apple Tree

[major_clanger]

As I mentioned a few days ago, I succumbed to temptation at the Apple Expo and ordered a new computer. A shiny G5, no less, with generous educational discount thanks to my status as an OU student. That was on October 29th, and I was advised as I'd ordered some options (extra memory, bigger hard drive and so on) the machine would ship in about five days.

When I checked the Order Status page at Apple's web site, it gave an estimated shipping date of 7th November, which if you count working days pretty much matches what I'd been told. Mindful of ever-changing estimated shipping dates the last time I ordered a Mac, I've been checking the status report daily. The estimate shipping date has stayed firm at 7th November... even as the calendar sails happily past it.

A little disconcerted by this, I today called the order hotline. After a lot of rooting around the helpful chap on the other end advised that in fact my order was due to ship within the next 12 hours or so, which meant that I ought to receive it early next week.

All well and good! Except that I I've just had the following email:

Dear Apple Store Customer,

Thank you for shopping at the Apple Store.
The demand for the product you ordered has been higher than anticipated. We are shipping as quickly as possible, but cannot meet the ship date we previously estimated for you. We now expect to ship your order by November 18th, 2005.

I've just checked the order status page again. It still says November 7th.

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

This seems to be a lot of people's experience with Apple - nice kit but slow to deliver and occasionally very slow on servicing.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

This is Apple's online ordering system. The only time I have ordered from them without horrendous delays, it was a high-demand item (iPod nano 4Gb) -- and it was despatched within 24 hours, much to my astonishment. Low demand items are the deadly ones.

I am now mildly annoyed at Expansys. Yesterday I ordered a gadget from them which was out of stock and not expected for at least seven working days. I expected to do Novacon and be comfortably home before they shipped it. Well, I just checked their order site -- and they shipped it today, more than a week ahead of schedule! Which is just peachy, because it's coming by Royal Mail special delivery some time tomorrow, and I'm due to head off to Novacon before 11am, and the Royal Mail's tracking site link from Expansys is broken.

With any luck it'll get me out of bed at 9am. Aaagh.

well I appreciate it doesn't help you

[groliffe.livejournal.com]

but I ordered two new machines on 15th october, was given a dispatch date of 31 October (actual ship 29th) and expected delivery of 3-9 business days after that (i.e. anything up to the 11th of November). If I'd been in yesterday I'd have had them then, as it is I got them today. And one of those machines was a new iMac G5 which was shipped direct from Shanghai (presumably because none are in stock).

So the experience is at least not universal, mind you I wouldn't call that fast service, but at least they exceeded what they originally committed too, which always makes for a happy punter.

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

Don't bother looking at Apple's shipping tracker - it leads to premature hair loss. It claimed the plane bringing my iBook from China was in the air for four days solid. I was beginning to wonder if they'd sent it by dirigible, when it arrived somewhere in Scandinavia, spent a couple of days on holiday there, then instantly appeared in Ireland with no transit between the two, before finally making its way across to England a few days after that.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

This sounds like the flip side of those stories about postal services that would get mail to Alpha Centauri if you just used the correct address.

Perhaps if enough of us ordered the right goods, we could conjure up Zeppelins, and a mooring mast would sprout on the old GPO Tower.