Luke On Tech

I’m right in the middle of my finals for uni right now, which is meaning I’m quite pressed for time right now. This week’s Mac-centric post is going to centre on the Apple online Store – not the iTunes store, but the hardware store. I’ve had a really positive experience using it in the past, and I wanted to share some thoughts about the way it is laid out, how you can work out what it is you want, and how Apple could maybe improve it. I also wanted to highlight some of the problems I noticed whilst ordering my MacBook that could save you some time waiting for your order to arrive. So without further ado, here is the second of my “Switching to Mac” articles. Enjoy.

When it comes to ordering Macs, there is a pretty limited selection at first, which is good. Its not like many other companies, running multiple product lines without much explanation. For instance, I can go to look at the Sony Vaio website, and I have to choose between the “AR series”, the “C series”, the “BX series”, the “FE series”, the “G series”, the “N series”, the “UX series”, the “SZ series” and the “TX series”. Did you get that? Me neither. The taglines don’t help either: The TX Series is “A class of its own”, the C is “Inspired by life. Designed for you”. OK, it sounds good, but it isn’t the most informative. Contrast this with the Apple approach to marketing: Laptops: “Macbook (starting from £749)” or “MacBook Pro (starting from £1349)”. Desktops: “Mac Mini (from £399)”, “iMac (from £679)” or “Mac Pro (from £1699)”. Upfront, the names give you a rough idea of what you are looking at (except perhaps iMac), and you get to see a price point, so you know what sort of cost. For the average user, this seems ideal. They don’t necessarily know what they want, or understand all the jargon, but they have a rough idea of what they want to do with it, and how much they can afford. Then for each of the product lines, you get taken to a little page talking about that product and you can then pick and customise a model. Model choices come in essentially 3 flavours, there’s a basic one that costs least but is probably lacking one important thing for a power user, or is slightly under-spec. Then there is the decent version, that has a nice middle of the road price point and is highly functional. And finally, there is the premium version, with widgets you probably don’t need but might get tempted by if you have the cash to splash. Its all very simple, very intuitive. However, and here is where I’m going to prove that I haven’t gone all fanboy on you guys, that’s about where the good news ends. If you want to customise your machine, say put a bigger hard drive on it, forget about getting it within a week – the little widget tells you up front that it will be 3 days before they even ship your machine to you. OK, fine for something requiring extensive customisation, but I wanted to add a cable to my order, because my MacBook uses non-standard connectors to the monitor, and I needed a converter. And was told, in all seriousness that that would add an additional two days to the time to ship my order, just to put a cable into the box – in fact I don’t really know how they did it, the estimated delivery date with the cable was actually a week later than without, so its more like an additional 7 days they were allowing. That to me seems ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that I didn’t see an option to change my shipping method. That to me is unforgivable. I’ve been in situations where the standard shipping isn’t good enough – I need it right now, overnight it to me I don’t care how much it costs. Equally, there is often a need to get it on a Saturday and pay a premium for that, and that’s an option that is becoming more and more prevalent. But there was none of that, and that seems stupid since Apple is such a giant corporation – if they wanted to do it, they could easily. I suspect that some of the reason they don’t is that they figure that people who need that kind of immediacy will visit one of their retail stores – that’s fine and all, but currently the nearest Apple Store to me is something like 300 miles away (until the Glasgow store opens this summer). I guess I could always go to a reseller, but that’s not an ideal solution for anyone, since I still have to travel, and I assume Apple sell to resellers at a marked down price so that resellers can actually have a viable business.

Anyhow, I’ve been drooling and plotting my Mac purchase for quite a while, so I had worked out exactly what I wanted, but the layout of the whole experience made it pretty simplistic to navigate, find what I wanted without being particularly blinded by specifications, and then tweak it (or not) as required. In total, the experience really couldn’t be made any easier, although I still haven’t gotten over the insane delivery times quoted. That said, their estimate was bang on, and the courier arrived exactly with the time frame they suggested – although they gave themselves a three day window, so it isn’t that big an accomplishment. I ordered on Friday, and received the laptop on Wednesday – they didn’t actually process my order until lunchtime on Tuesday. I can’t help but think that there isn’t much reason why I couldn’t have received it Monday or even Saturday since they apparently did ship it overnight, but it was the day after they announced the Leopard delay, so I’m willing to concede that they were probably super-busy with people like me ordering as soon as they heard about the delay.

The online Apple Store is definitely well put together, and honestly, I would suggest that anyone wanting to get a Mac use it. You are going to get as good a deal as a local reseller will give you I’d guess, and at the end of the day, there is no real benefit to dealing locally with regard building a rapport or getting deals on servicing, except perhaps in fairly specific circumstances.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under General Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.