Bought from Amazon...

I decided to buy a Macbook Pro and wanted to get the best deal and after looking around found out that Amazon was the way to go. List, the highest end MBP is $2299. Amazon had it for $2110 which is a great deal... especially with the tax savings. Anyway... I just went to amazon to check out the price now a few weeks later and it seems to have gone up to $2239. That's $130 more... I didn't know amazon's prices fluctuate like that but I guess I'm happy I got in when I did. Just thought I'd share because I found it interesting. I'm very happy with purchasing from Amazon and didn't have any problems. (even had snow leopard preinstalled)

 

Yeah, for some reason Amazon bumps Mac prices up and down randomly every few weeks. I was looking for the base 13" MBP and they have it for $1159 every so often (vs. normal Amazon price of $1195). I ended up getting mine @ Best Buy (because I got a bunch of gift cards for my b-day) but otherwise I would've went the Amazon route too.

 

they do that with all products not just apple.

supply economics.

 

I've had good experiences with Amazon. I've bought all my macs from there, except my current one, and only have good things to say about them. Very reliable. And yes, their prices do fluctuate a lot, you'll notice it even more if you load up your shopping cart with things you want and wait a while before you buy, every once in a while it'll tell you that x item has gone up or down in price by x amount. I can't remember when it was that I got a mac mini there for $520 (mid product cycle so it wasn't old stock), just one time I went in the cart and said mac mini went down by $79, so I immediately bought it, w000. lol.

Plus they take credit cards with international billing addresses.

 

Amazon prices are based on demand. As demand goes up, so do the prices. When demand slumps, the prices drop a bit. I noticed this a few years ago. It's all automated by their system. So you'll see it fluctuate from time to time especially on electronics.

 

I purchased my MBP through Amazon and picked it up for $1097.00 it was the base 13" model, but the tax savings and $3.99 overnight shipping was a no brainer.

I have purchased thousands of dollars from Amazon over the last couple of years much of it for my business. I've always had a great experience with them. Had one Notebook that was bad, they paid the shipping back and immediately credited my account the same day they received in back.

Also I got a 360gb 7200RPM hard drive and 4gb of Ram for my base MPB which I installed myself and saved about $300 in upgrade cost or going to the next model to get these specs. Amazon Rocks!

 

DO you notice a big difference in speed with the 7200 drive... thinking of maybe going SSD...

 

The only "real" speed gains you'll notice by going to a 7200RPM drive will be a second or two shaved off boot times and when loading large programs or game levels.

I just picked up a "Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT" off Amazon for $84.99 for my 13" MBP. No slower than the original and way bigger! And with the MBP, no need to worry about getting one of the slightly more expensive drives with a free-fall sensor as the sensors are already built into the motherboard

 

It also depends on how dense the platters are.

Denser platters will increase seek times just as faster RPMs will speed up seek times.

 

Hmm... thinking of going with a solid state drive but not sure if it will play well being partitioned because I use Windows a lot on my mac in bootcamp.