Today I bought myself the new 2.0 GHz MacBook. It’s such a beautiful machine, and I think it will be serving me well in the coming years.

I don’t get the chance to make such a big purchase very often, but when I do, I consider it for a while from afar, and when I make my decision, I walk right in and up to the first employee, point to the computer and say, “I’d like to buy that MacBook.” “Do you know which one you want?” “Yes. This one.” From their reactions I have to imagine that they don’t see this happen very often. “And I’d like to upgrade the ram to 4 gigs.” A little confused, they call for someone to ring me up.

I walked into the 29th Street Mall Apple Store at 5:10, bought the thing at 5:20, and was assured that it would be just a few minutes while they switched out the ram. Forty minutes later, they bring out my computer, and I’m on my way. I get home, turn it on – all fun and games until I select “About This Mac.” Only 2 gigs of ram. I should have prefaced this by saying that this summer, Henrique bought himself a brand new MacBook Pro at this same location, upgraded the ram as I did, and found out the same thing upon arrival as I did – they hadn’t switched out the ram.

It was too classic for me to be completely irate, but I called the store and told them other places they could put the extra ram. I’ll be going in tomorrow morning to get it sorted, but this is unbelievable to me. Not only that the guy doing the job took out two sticks of ram, looks at the four sticks he now has sitting there, and decides to put the same two in. Bad as that is, what really gets me is that it takes 40 minutes to not switch out the ram.

That said, I very much enjoy Apple’s products, and I know a (now ex-) Apple rep or two who’re good guys, but this is just amazing.

After checking my mailbox, I returned to my apartment somewhat disappointed, but looking forward to Monday. A few hours, a knock on my door and a signature later, I was ready to make the switch. I have since spent the last (too many) hours installing my favorite software and setting preferences and whatnot. (You see, this isn’t really my mac switch per se – this last year I started using the schools Macs for my programming needs and was blown away. School ended, no more Mac – what’s a boy to do?)

Yesterday I finally got the internet in my dorm. It’s not very good by any means, and I have yet to be able to download anything more than a couple of megabytes, but at least I can do some of my research at home. The States clock me at around 400 kbps, Japan clocks me around 1.5 Mbps, but I haven’t gotten downloads faster than 35 kbps. I guess I’m spoiled from the dorms at Mines.

Yesterday is also when I ordered my brand new macBook. I know I boasted before that I was making the switch, but now I have. I couldn’t place my order through the US site as they don’t ship internationally, so I went to Apple’s Japanese site. The only trouble is, it’s in Japanese. And also, you have to input your shipping address in kanji. Who wants to deal with that? I’m very fortunate that they have a service hotline in English, and I called up, greeted with Japanese, and I asked them as best as I could in Japanese if they spoke English. The woman explained in a phonetically-memorized script that she was sorry that no English speakers were available, and if she could please have my phone number, a representative would call back shortly. A few minutes later, I was on the phone with Kuni, whose English impressed me. He helped me place my order, get my student discount (interestingly enough, I didn’t need to provide any authentication that I was actually a student) and all that.

I got the white macBook Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, upgraded to 2 gigs of ram, and even a US keyboard layout. They said it should be a few days before it ships, and then it should be on my doorstep between December 15 and 20. In retrospect, I think I may have chosen a poor time to order.