DigitalSandbox

So last night I placed my order. An order that I have been dreaming of all summer. I have finally ordered my precious MacBook Pro.

I wish it hadn’t been an order as I would have loved to have walked out with it right then and there, but the reason for an order is a good one. They are taking orders becasue if we can get enough orders together we will get a better price from Apple. A price below the educational discount. And that makes it worthwile.

So here are all the juicy details…

I decided after much debating to go with the 17” beauty. This was not an easy decision to make. I have long maintained (and still do) that the 15” is the perfect blend of portability and screen size. I decided to get the 17” for two important reasons.

First, The extra screen space will be very useful for desinging on. If I had a nice 20” (or, dare I dream, larger) screen at home I would likely have gone with the 15” version. But since I don’t I decided to get the bigger screen.

Secondly, the 15” and the 17” are not matched feature-wise. Traditionally, the two have been matched in features and it would come down to if you wanted a bigger screen or more portability. Alas, the 15” lacks a FW 800 port, sports one less USB 2.0 port, and has a 4x single-layer SuperDrive versus the 8x DL SuperDrive int he 17”. So long story short I decided to get the most machine I can get because this deal won’t come around again (since I graduate this year).

This comes with the 100 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive and 1 GB of RAM. So I got an additional 1 GB of RAM to slap in there Just looked at my order and it looks like they rung in the wrong SKU. According to my order, I am getting a 1 GB USB drive. I was going to buy one of these anyway, but I may need to talk to someone about this screw up tomorrow. It also includes the 3 year AppleCare service in the price.

Software-wise I added only 2 packages to the bundled software. iWork 06 for my papers and such and Adobe CS2. Both of those were priced below the traditional educational discount. iWork was only $40 as opposed to the customary $50. CS2 was a mere $200 instead of $500. So I am very excited about that.

One of the best parts of the deal is that even though we are getting better deals than the educational discount we are still eligible for the “Buy a Mac, get an iPod” deal that Apple is running. So I added a 2 GB iPod Nano ? in black ? to the mix. And then I will get that money back in a rebate.

They are going to be taking the rest of the orders today and tomorrow after which they will see what they can do about the volume discounts. I hope a ton of students take advantage of this offer, because it is truly awesome ? and I want a good deal.

They even expect to have them in stock by the end of next week. I hope they come by Thursday. I am going out of town on Friday ? gotta start of the Labor day weekend right ? and I want to bring mine with me.