Journal: News & Comment

Just one little extra thing

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Buying something online is fun because you can browse and pick and choose at your leisure, then have it delivered to your door. But it doesn't have the same immediacy as going to a store and picking something up. There are other peculiar frustrations too.

Take our new eMac, for instance. I ordered it in the wee hours of Monday morning, when nearly any store would have been closed. It's a custom-built configuration, with a bunch of accessories, so I knew it would take a few days to be ready. The nice thing is that we can check at any time on the status of the order, to find out if it's been shipped, and if so, where the package is.

And yes, last night at about 7:00 pm, the order shipped. Sort of. We'd chosen to ship the various things we ordered when each was ready, rather than only when everything was set to go—because I'd heard horror stories of someone's brand new top-of-the-line computer being delayed by the mysterious unavailability of a spare wall plug or something.

So now Apple is shipping us an external FireWire hard disk, a tilt-and-swivel stand, two video adapters, and a USB MIDI musical keyboard interface, all of which should arrive tomorrow. Everything we need for our new computer system—except the computer.

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