Last night I called Apple again at about 5pm since I hadn’t yet received an email with my fedex label in it. The person I spoke with said there was no record of me talking to them before about this and getting a label, so they sent me one right away. I got it in my inbox while still on the phone with them.

So I printed the label and dashed off to FedEx. You see, Apple assembles the machines in China, so if I could get them to start the order last night, they’d have all day in China to work on it. Anyway, I got to FedEx and sent the package, got my tracking number and called Apple.

"Sorry, it doesn’t show up on fedex.com yet." Great. I watched the FedEx man load my package onto his truck. He said he scanned it and it was in the system. I ask Apple to check again. No dice. I talk to a supervisor at customer support. He says there’s essentially nothing he can do until it shows up on the fedex.com webpage as having been shipped. But what he can do is take $100 off my order. So that’s nice, but I tell him that if he could just get me my freaking laptop, I’d pay him an extra $100.

Frustrated, I get off the phone and head to Heather’s for Halloween. On the way, I check the fedex tracking site on my Windows Mobile phone. The package is showing up! Wonderful, I think, and call back Apple. Of course, I can never talk to the same person, but the person I speak to says they’ll release the hold on the order and set it for next day shipping so that it comes in 1 day rather than 2 when they finally do ship it from China. That’s something, at least. I get off the phone, marginally happier.

When I get to Heather’s, I decide to check my mail to see if Apple has sent any updates. They have. I take a look and they say I have a replacement order number. So I check it out on http://apple.com/orderstatus.

WTF!!!?!~! It says that Apple canceled the order. This is getting absurd and now Apple is closed for the day. I have to wait for the next day (now) to call them.

So this morning at 7, as soon as I woke up, I called Apple. They say, yes, it was canceled. Because it had a non-glossy screen. LOL. This is just too absurd. Apple is trying to send me matte again. They say there’s another replacement order open. I take a look and find out that this replacement order is set for standard, rather than overnite, shipping. I ask them to fix that and they do. But it’s still got an estimated ship date of 11/7.

I hate Apple. They feel much more like a monopoly to me than MS ever did. Consider: I want a Mac. I have only one choice of where to buy it. I can buy it from Apple. If I want a PC and Alienware gives me bad service (as they did) I can decide never to buy from them again and go to Dell (or Apple) instead. But if I want a Mac, I have no recourse but to buy from Mr. Jobs. It’s extraordinarily fristrating to be a consumer bereft of choice.

I hate Apple because their product is so cool that I feel I have no choice but to buy it, and given that, I have no choice but to buy it from them. I have no choice with Apple. With Microsoft, you can go to Dell, Alienware, DP. You can get a chip from Intel or AMD. You can get any number of graphics cards, sound cards, displays, etc. With Mac, you’re stuck.

But they’re still cool.