If you bought an Apple product — say a MacBook Pro — during October, before the launch of Leopard, you’re entitled to the $10-upgrade to Leopard (nick-named ‘up-to-date’), you could be fooled into thinking that with the $2000 purchase receipt in hand, you could walk into an Apple Store, say in New York, pay them the $10 and walk away with Leopard. Right?
It certainly sounds fair to me. The stores are official Apple stores, there should be nothing stopping them from extending the offer to walk-in customers. And you might’ve put down two grand just a couple of days prior to the launch of Leopard, so really, they owe you…
That however, is not the case. For what I can only deem to be entirely artificial reasons, the up-to-date program is an online offer only! And that’s despite the fact that the $10 upgrade package is exactly the same as the retail package.
I’m guessing the reasoning lies in the $120 difference between the upgrade and the retail price. That is, there are people, like me, who are so eager to get Leopard, that they might actually pay full price for a product they otherwise are entitled to for a measly $10.
I don’t want to think that about Apple, but I’m just really really disappointed right now, that I didn’t get to take Leopard home with me.
Update: Received my ‘upgrade’ DVD of Leopard today. Yup. ‘Upgrade’. So I can’t reinstall the machine with Leopard without going through Tiger. That’s cheap Apple. Cheap. And it wasn’t boxed either, in that cool psychedelic scifi Leopard box. Oh, and it’s a double layer DVD too.
Guess what I’m torrentin’ right now…
As i see it, it’s probably a way they’ve implemented to prevent people from getting multiple copies for $10. If you can only get it from one source, there’s no room for error.
I went through the same thing when i bought my first mac (the month before Tiger came out) and i was pretty satisfied with the time Tiger took to get to my house.
Hope you’re having fun in NYC. I was there last Nov. and had the time of my life!
You should have probably waited to buy your mac, AFTER its release. Why would you bother with a second install? It seems alot cleaner to have them do it for you.
That’s what I’m doing at least
What I could have done is irrelevant to the issue.
Mark, that would make sense, except the Apple stores would also have access to the Apple network; however it might be set up. It would be easy to run a check against the serial number of my MacBook Pro to see if I had already cashed in on the offer.
That’s actually a really good point from Mark. Still a shame that they couldn’t have had a rudimentary system in place to track ‘walk-in’ sales.
I’m about as much of an Apple fan-boy as they come and I am always disappointed on the off occasion they seem to make a bum call.
The other day I decided to take a look in my local official Apple store (Brisbane, Australia), and found a copy of iLife for AU$30 more than the online price. I actually did purchase this for the higher price point because I DID want to take it home with me. (Plus I would have been up for a shipping charge buying online since it was less than the required amount for free shipping.) Did I feel a bit ripped? Yeah I did. Why would an ‘official’ store offer first party software for a different price point than the online store? Probably for solid marketing reasons but I wasn’t thrilled at the time.
The excuse I was told was that the Apple Store would only have so many copies and if everyone came in to claim the “up-to-date” offer, they wouldn’t have enough. Still think it’s a pretty lame excuse, especially when they don’t offer delivery options other than the standard postal delivery…
That’s also a silly excuse, considering that I plunked down $2000 for something to run it on.
That’s why i use linux, free updates for life – and it’s reasonably snappy on my PIII-800 with 768Mb RAM I run it on :P
(but yeah, I have an amd64 with xp for my gaming needs, and a couple of freebsd servers to keep my geek status up :P)
Seems we are getting different excuses from different places. I was told they were unable to offer the walk in deal because they were unable to track the who was getting the discount effectively. Seemed like a load of crap, especially when they had my serial number right there…
It’s also silly that they’d worry about multiple copies considering that each copy can be used on multiple Macs.
I’m a long time reader / lurker (I don’t comment often), but I experienced directly the insanity that is going on with the Leopard release. I had been a longtime PC user and to make a long story short, was just tired of all the garbage I had to deal with on my PC (not that I can’t do it — I’m a programmer, it’s just I’d rather not have to reformat / update drivers manually / fix device conflicts and all that).
I decided this past weekend it was time to get onboard with the Mac, to become a true switcher so to speak. So I went to my local Apple reseller and bought a new 20” iMac and a 13” Macbook for my wife. I packed up our pc’s and the loads of cables / wires / and peripherals we had, cleaned up my office and setup the Mac computers. It was amazing how much more room my small office had.
Anyways, I’ve been super happy with the machines but I couldn’t get the Leopard upgrade in store either. The sales rep told me they hadn’t received their shipment of “drop-in” discs that Apple was shipping out to customers who were purchasing new Macs with Tiger preloaded. I was a little miffed, but the salesperson was good enough to deduct the cost of the shipping and order for the up-to-date discs from my purchase ($30 US).
While it would have been nice to have Leopard up and running asap, I’m just so happy with the Mac over my PC that I’m not too worried about waiting the 5 business days for my copies to arrive. I’ll chalk it up to mac-euphoria as a newtime macphile, but they really should have been better prepared for new customers in retail outlets.
Well, I’ll put it simple, in my country there is no software copyright law enforcement so i’ll get leopard straight off the net.
Don’t upgrade….…… sooo much fuckup with good old programs :o
Ordered my up-to-date on Thursday last week. It arrived Monday. You don’t get the boxed Retail Version, btw. Its a “Not For Resale – Upgrade DVD” You must have OS 10.4 running (who knows what kind of protection i.e. is it machine specific; no macbook x no upgrade). You can do a simple upgrade (as I did– and everything went swimmingly, Photoshop CS3 opens in 5 seconds! Only old app that crashed was an old version of Safari or Webkit I had lurking. Mail.app hung the first time but is perfect now.
They don’t have them in store because this will only affect a small percentage of users, it means shipping out a box of dvds – different set of leopard os’es – no Mike it is not exactly the same – and hiding them under a counter, or round the back. The system behind it would be fairly simple in store: you give a serial no., they’d have to double check the system (that you hadn’t picked up your disks already! heh) and go get your disks. But there’s no long-term retail advantage for the ‘retail store’. I mean you’re paying delivery – that’s the £5. If you went to pick it-up you’d have a load of tight-arses both wasting apple retail employees’ time and wanting it all for free.
sorry i rushed this– on my way to work :D
You may want to ask them to ship it to the store, depending upon how long you are in New York. It is a somewhat strange request, but most stores I’ve been to oblige. I will typically do this if I’m new to an area or planning to move soon. Give the store a call and ask the manager-on-duty so that you can make arrangements.
Unfortunate, but it’s $10, or £15 (here) so that’s a tenth of the cost (or so) of the full thing for a mere few days wait.