scott.hodson.blog

So I’ve been taking advantage of the various upswings of Apple’s stock over the last few months successfully enough that I took out some of my stock options trading proceeds to get a MacBook Pro! It’s pretty loaded, 2GB RAM, 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, 2.16GHz Dual Core, etc, $2000 from Craigslist. I’ve got Windows 2003 Server running on it in Parallels as well.

Ironically I ordered a new Dell E1505 about 2 weeks previously with a smokin’ Core 2 Duo chip, 160GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 256 Aero-ready video card, etc., in other words also loaded. I got what I thought was a great deal, $1650! But I bought it with a Dell Credit application and a ship date with 1 month in the future. I was ticked about the so-far-in-the-future ship date but I figured they are just practicing UPOD (under-promise over-deliver) and the 160HDDs and Core 2 Duo “Merom” chip supplies are pretty new so I gave them some slack on that.

So in the meantime while waiting for the Dell to be built I saw this MBP for sale which seemed like a nice price. I’ve seen many well-priced MacBook deals on Craigslist for several months yet the seller usually never replies, probably because he’s just harvesting email addresses to sell by teasing us with cheap MacBooks, but I use my Gmail account so they can spam me all they want. But this latest deal came through with what seemed like a good price (new it would cost $2899+tax) so I pulled the trigger and the transaction went smoothly at a Starbucks in San Clemente at 9:30 at night.

Meanwhile, today I check on my Dell order wondering if I should keep the order going or just make a go with the MacBook Pro full-time and I notice that Dell has canceled my order! Without any notice! So I call the 800 number, get outsourced to some call center who can’t explain why the order was canceled, and somehow I get transferred to some call tree menu when she put me on hold. So I go to Dell’s website and reprice the same notebook with a similar coupon I had before and the notebook is now $300 more expensive! Bogus!

Sorry in today’s battle, Steve Jobs: 1, Michael Dell: 0. And if I’m not satisfied with using the MBP full-time I’m looking at HP’s now after having bought many dells workstations, notebooks and servers over the last 10+ years. In the meantime, I’m wondering how some of these near-thousand-class Visual Studio.NET projects and multi-GB SQL Server databases are going to perform for me on Parallels. I’ll let you know. If it works out I guess that would officially make me a “switcher”. Whoa…

UPDATE 10/2/2006 - I just called Dell and asked them to reinstate the order with a different payment method and they did, at the original price. They also upgraded the video card from the Nvidia 7300 to the ATI X1400.