Any advantage to buying a MBP from the Apple Store vs. an online retailer?

Hi, all.

Any advantage to buying a MBP from the Apple Store vs. an online retailer?

I'm tempted to get the 5% discount from MacMall.

Thanks.

 

If you don't buy it from Apple directly (Apple Store or their website) then you lose convenience of walking into an Apple Store to return the laptop.

Any problems with your system from an online retailer and you have to potentially ship it back to them or go through Apple Care Warranty.

 

depends the store and where you are at.

I can save big bucks ordering from Amazon, because i can often (if i look for sales) get the same price as the Apple education discount, plus Amazon has no presence in my state, so they can't charge me any tax (which is 10% here)... thats hundreds there.

For legal purposes your supposed to report untaxed out of state purchases and pay them yourself, but its rare to find anyone who even knows that let alone does it.

 

I like to buy at the store because if you get a dead/stuck pixel or a doa you can just go right back and exchange it the same day.

 

Did you buy your i7, antiglare screen MBP from the store?
Did they just have some that had those specifications, as those are not the stock options in the 17 inch.

 

well if you want to pick it up right off Apple Store... it got to be stock configuration. I believe you can have optional upgrades pre-order ...then you might need to wait 3-4 days to come back to pick it up.

The only product I bought from Apple is my iPod Touch so I am not sure if this can be done this way of having optional upgrades request in store.

 

Not necessarily true.

I bought a MB from Mac Warehouse online 1 year ago. After a couple of months, the motherboard was having problems with the graphics adapter. I took it into the local Apple Store. The Genius Bar verified that the problem was not a simple fix, and replaced the laptop on the spot. There was never an issue with where I bought it, only when did I buy it (that it was still under warranty).

 

Yes, on the very first day of the mbp updates, I called up 2 apple stores near me (both 10 minutes away from where I live).

The one at the memorial mall only had the 13" and 15" available with no antiglare options (and they werent even selling it until 5pm-6pm)!

BUT the galleria store (I'm guessing since there are more rich folks around that area??) was already selling it since the morning of that day and had all options instock (except the 15" hi res antiglare but they did have the glossy hi res), but I really wanted a 17" hi res antiglare and thats what I got!

I actually got my i7 17" 2 days ago just wanted to post it today as I had time to play with it more.

I was on campus for 10+ hours yesterday (morning classes throughout night) and I didnt even bring the charger with me and by the time I got home, I still had 43 minutes left of battery life!

The battery life is amazing, pretty much with my intel SSD I was getting almost 11 hours of battery life (with 1 notch of brightness which is PLENTY bright on an led display, 4 spaces and surfing the web and the on and off usage of vmware fusion for compiling c programming) and since there are no glares its so perfect (even outside is perfectly viewable) and saves battery life considerably.

 

Hm I wonder if I could call the store in Calgary (City 2 hours from where I live) and get some to "order in" a 17" i7, anti-glare with the 7200RPM 500GB Drive...

Unfortunately I don't have the money right now to pay an extra $600 for a decent sized SSD, but as far as I know I can change out the HD and RAM myself without voiding a warranty/applecare yes?

 

Give it a try, it couldnt hurt to ask.

Thats what I did on the morning the new mbp were updated. I called the first store and they didnt have it and then called the galleria and told me they had plenty.

 

The various discounts you can find online for your Apple products are quite nice and unavailable in the box store.

 

Hold on a second... you use VMWare Fusion to go into Windows to compile your C programs??? If that's the case I'm disappointed... your university has failed you.

 

Jeez what crawled up your butt lol.
I just use the compiler that the professor makes us use, I've tried the gcc compiler and it's a bit different to follow through with in class.

 

Ah, alright, I can understand if its for a certain compiler, but you want experience with unix based systems(jobs expect this from you after graduation) wherever possible. So if you are doing programming on your machine get comfortable with the terminal, and whenever possible steer clear of Windows for this task. It'll save battery life as well.

 

> For legal purposes your supposed to report untaxed out of state purchases
> and pay them yourself, but its rare to find anyone who even knows that let
> alone does it.

These are called use taxes where you buy things from out-of-state which doesn't have a sales tax and then use them in a state with a sales tax. At the moment, this is essentially lost sales tax revenue to states. I've seen states do crazy things to try to collect these taxes.

In the current budget environments, I would expect some stronger efforts at enforcement but mainly to upper-income taxpayers or maybe small businesses. One recourse that states have is to require access to your credit card information where they could go through stuff that you've purchased out-of-state without paying sales or use taxes. Pretty intrusive stuff but it's getting easier with more and more information on computers.

 

There are also alot of IDE's you can get for C on the mac side that are very easy to use and easier to use then the tex editor/compiler unless your professor WANTS you to use a specific compiler which Is pretty dumb imo.

 

for my future reference, what's the best way to do this in a mac environment?

(as I install Visual Studio 2010 on my Dell desktop. lol)

 

Good ol' g++ or gcc compiler via terminal . Learning terminal prompts has a bit of a learning curve but once you have it down you won't go back.

A few good IDEs I use are Xcode, Eclipse(these two can compile from within them), and TextWrangler(don't think it has compilation features). But I usually use an IDE like Xcode just to edit and then run the code via terminal. There are terminal editors as well such as emacs, or vim(recommended-very powerful). Almost all hardcore programmers can do everything through a terminal(by these standards I'm no hardcore programmer haha-but I have seen some and some of the things they can do is crazy).

And if you want to use any revision control systems(Git, Subversion, etc), Eclipse and Xcode have support for these built-in just FYI. And yes I highly recommend using a revision control system for your work(doesn't just have to be programming).

Oh and one last thing, everything I have mentioned above is completely free!