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Ok, will someone please sell me a Mac!? I’d like a 15″ Powerbook (Combo Drive) with an extra 1/2 G of RAM running OS X 10.4. If you have one that works, please let me know because I can’t seem to get a hold of one. If you want to hear a bizarre story of why I am not now and may never be a Mac user, read on.

Here’s the story. June 25, I go to a local reseller and ask for the Powerbook. They say they have none in stock but we order one through them anyway and they say they are expecting an order that should arrive arrive sometime from 2 days to 2 weeks after we ordered. Sounds good, we can wait a bit. In case you don’t have a calendar handy, today is 3 weeks since we ordered the thing. Apparently the resellers are having trouble getting any product from Apple. Ok whatever. I’m not going to get into the inanity of official Apple resellers not having Apple products to sell. So this morning we go to another local reseller just to see what they might have and low and behold they actually have exactly what I want (minus the 1/2 G of ram, but they assure me I can get that installed later). Cool. I call the first place and cancel the order and we decide to purchase the Powerbook from the second place. At the cash I noticed the outside of the box just says OS X. It doesn’t say 10.4. So putting on my best noob mac owner face, I ask if the salesguy if the machine has Tiger installed. The sales guy says yes and even checks when they got the machine which was June 7. So yeah, it should be running 10.4. Great. We go home, turn it on and find out – 10.3.7. WTF? We phone the salesguy and he says to just go online and fill out a form to get Apple to send me 10.4 and the reseller even offered to pay the $10 US that apple will charge. Well that was nice, but you want me to do what!? I just paid a truck load of money for something that isn’t in the condition I want it and you expect me to figure out how to fix it. If this was a year later, then maybe yeah, it is my responsibility, but it has literally been 45 minutes since I purchased the thing and it is clearly not what I paid for. So, long story short, we took it back. Maybe we’re too picky, but frankly if we pay that much money I don’t expect the product to be screwed the second I get it home.

So now what? I don’t know. Both Andi and I are soured on the whole Mac thing. They look nice, they smell nice, but what a frickin pain to get a hold of what we want. Perhaps if we order direct from Apple we will have some more luck, but we’re going to take a good long look and see if we really want to spend that much money after this much trouble. We’ll see.