Monday, February 26, 2007
I've had just about enough of Amazon's clunkiness
So my sister finally decides to replace her antique G3 iMac with a new bottom-of-the-line MacBook and asks me to help her find the best deal. After looking around for deals and finding that (no surprise) there are none, I end up recommending that she use Amazon due to the fact that A) there's no sales tax and B) there's a $75 rebate. Realisticaly there's no other way to get a new MacBook for less than $1099 these days, so despite my growing concern over Amazon's Marketplace nonsense and questionable rebate practices, I went ahead and told her to use them anyway. It wasn't going to be a Marketplace purchase anyway, and even without the rebate it still the cheapest option.
One problem. She calls me up and says that she's looking on Amazon.com and can't find what she's looking for. She's too computer savvy to not be able to find something right in front of her face, so I go to Amazon myself and try to figure out the problem. I click on "computers" on their main page and go to the "laptops" section and click on "Apple". I should be looking at a clean, concise listing of the current MacBook and MacBook Pro models, right? Nope, not a chance. I'm looking at a list of search results whose first three results are various AppleCare packages, followed by an iBook, followed by a PowerBook, followed by AppleCare for the Mac Mini. The MacBook Pro clocks in at the fourteenth spot on the list, and the MacBook appears in the sixteenth slot. What is this, someone's scattered garage sale?
So I try typing "MacBook" into Amazon's search box, and the results I get are a mish-mosh of MacBook and MacBook Pro models, with no indication of which ones might be the current models and which ones are discontinued stuff they're trying to blow out, and worse, no prices. In a stunning display of cheesiness, you actaully have to place the darn thing into your shopping cart in order to find out what it costs. This would be like picking up a milk carton in the grocery store and having to take it to the register and have the cashier run it through checkout in order for you to find out what the price is.
No wonder she was confused about what she was looking at. If I hadn't known enough to look up the precise specs of the current low-end MacBook on Apple's website, I couldn't have been sure that the model I was pointing her toward on the Amazon site was the correct one.
What a freaking mess. Amazon, at least when it comes to computers, is such an absolute disaster these days that I don't know how anyone but those in the know can go computer shopping at Amazon and actually end up with what they were trying to buy. It's not enough to keep me from shopping there, at least when they offer a substantially lowest price, but I'm finding it ever more difficult to recommend them to anyone else. I'm not sure which is the more relevant question: how on earth the world's leading internet retailer can offer such a joke of a shopping experience, or how on earth they can still be in business.
So my sister finally decides to replace her antique G3 iMac with a new bottom-of-the-line MacBook and asks me to help her find the best deal. After looking around for deals and finding that (no surprise) there are none, I end up recommending that she use Amazon due to the fact that A) there's no sales tax and B) there's a $75 rebate. Realisticaly there's no other way to get a new MacBook for less than $1099 these days, so despite my growing concern over Amazon's Marketplace nonsense and questionable rebate practices, I went ahead and told her to use them anyway. It wasn't going to be a Marketplace purchase anyway, and even without the rebate it still the cheapest option.
One problem. She calls me up and says that she's looking on Amazon.com and can't find what she's looking for. She's too computer savvy to not be able to find something right in front of her face, so I go to Amazon myself and try to figure out the problem. I click on "computers" on their main page and go to the "laptops" section and click on "Apple". I should be looking at a clean, concise listing of the current MacBook and MacBook Pro models, right? Nope, not a chance. I'm looking at a list of search results whose first three results are various AppleCare packages, followed by an iBook, followed by a PowerBook, followed by AppleCare for the Mac Mini. The MacBook Pro clocks in at the fourteenth spot on the list, and the MacBook appears in the sixteenth slot. What is this, someone's scattered garage sale?
So I try typing "MacBook" into Amazon's search box, and the results I get are a mish-mosh of MacBook and MacBook Pro models, with no indication of which ones might be the current models and which ones are discontinued stuff they're trying to blow out, and worse, no prices. In a stunning display of cheesiness, you actaully have to place the darn thing into your shopping cart in order to find out what it costs. This would be like picking up a milk carton in the grocery store and having to take it to the register and have the cashier run it through checkout in order for you to find out what the price is.
No wonder she was confused about what she was looking at. If I hadn't known enough to look up the precise specs of the current low-end MacBook on Apple's website, I couldn't have been sure that the model I was pointing her toward on the Amazon site was the correct one.
What a freaking mess. Amazon, at least when it comes to computers, is such an absolute disaster these days that I don't know how anyone but those in the know can go computer shopping at Amazon and actually end up with what they were trying to buy. It's not enough to keep me from shopping there, at least when they offer a substantially lowest price, but I'm finding it ever more difficult to recommend them to anyone else. I'm not sure which is the more relevant question: how on earth the world's leading internet retailer can offer such a joke of a shopping experience, or how on earth they can still be in business.
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