A New Mac for the Extended Family

My nuclear family has 1 Mac - a Macbook 13". My wife enjoys everything about it - except that there is limited MMORPG support on the platform.

So, my father-in-laws is suffering from chronic slow computer disease. We ordered a Mac for him, considering that he doesn't have MMORPG needs at all and he needs his computer for e-mail, internet, spreadsheet and ancestry/family tree/ genome project needs and that is it - it is a logical choice for him.

We ordered a Mac Mini, as that certainly far outstrips his needs - at 1.66 Ghz and Intel Core Duo it is a reasonably nice machine, even if it is a bit slower than the Mac book we purchased for my wife while she was pregnant.

It bothers me, though. What bothers me, you ask?

Well, there is an Apple store in Menlo Park Mall here in NJ. We went there in the hopes of purchasing the machine and taking it home and transferring my father-in-laws files. His old e-machines computer was working at that time.

But, I would never purchase any machine at this time with only 512MB or RAM. And that is exactly what the Mac Mini comes with (even if you go up and buy the faster machine!).

And there is the hitch in my plot. If you buy 1GB of memory online they charge like $79. If you want the 1 GB in the store, they are going to charge you $150.

No, friggin way.

The excuse they gave at the store was that RAM costs more for them and that they actually do something something something and you end up with an extra chip.

Well, the extra chip is a waste and RAM costs aside, you should be able to offer in a standardized store the same thing you offer on a standardized web page. It isn't like CompUSA and they have a million things and charge on a FIFO basis for inventory.

In the Mac store they could charge it back to the web site and send the unused memory back to Apple. Or something similar that involved not charging the customer more for the option of necessary memory and pushing the customer to purchase through the web site for anything other than the default configuration.

So, we had to wait for the computer and just as luck would have it my father-in-laws e-machine died (horribly) and now things will be much harder to transfer.

It isn't like I don't have a drive enclosure for his old hard drive. It just makes things more difficult.