The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

May 3rd, 2005

Bloody Amazon

I like Amazon. Hon­estly I do, it’s just some­times they really screw things up. I’ve had Tiger on pre-order for what seems like weeks now. Then, a day before the launch I was expect­ing it to be shipped. 

After log­ging in, it was still show­ing that it hadn’t been dis­patched, but the date that was show­ing for estim­ated deliv­ery was yes­ter­day! Strange. So, I gave them a call and they said they’d been inund­ated with orders and their com­puter sys­tems had screwed up. So? 

Surely they should have expec­ted a high level of sales. Surely their sys­tems need to be able to cope with that. Long story short is that it wouldn’t be ship­ping from Amazon until the week of the 9th, so I can­celled and ordered it from Apple. It’s just not worth the grief for sav­ing a tenner.

So, there’s been lots of dis­cus­sion on Tiger so far. Some good. Some bad. What are your thoughts?

One thing that has been con­cern­ing me is my lack of backup pro­ced­ure at the moment (looks like i’m not alone either!). I’ve been hold­ing out for Lacie to release their Eth­er­net Min­id­isk as it looks like a really handy piece of kit for a home net­work. Any­how, I’m hop­ing Tiger’s Backup and Install fea­ture is robust enough not to screw things up. 

We’ll see in a couple of days.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 10:09 am and is filed under Apple, News.

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4 Responses to “Bloody Amazon”

  1. Paul Livingstone said on: May 3rd, 2005 at 12:33 pm

    It’s not that dif­fer­ent a story from mine. Although I hate to tell you, I pre-ordered it from Apple, and I’ve still not recieved it. Apple UK and the com­pany they use for logist­ics (deliv­ery) TNT UK can’t make up their minds who to blame. Appar­ently neither one of them were suf­fi­ciently pre­pared for the orders they recieved for Tiger.

    As of 2 hours ago, TNT claim that my Tiger (and iLife 05) is miss­ing… and Apple have no idea what’s going on. 

    Although, Apple did tell me that TNT shipped Tiger to people in Lon­don on Sat­urday, even though it goes against their “we only ship on busi­ness days” policy. No such luck for us a little north of the bor­der. Bastards. 

    I, how­ever work for the edu­ca­tion sec­tor and deal with Apple all the time, and this is noth­ing new. Their cus­tomer ser­vice and deliv­ery times are reg­u­larly apalling.

  2. Jason Barry said on: May 3rd, 2005 at 1:55 pm

    Mark,

    I had the same exper­i­ence with Amazon.com. I pre-ordered my copy of “Tiger” on the 28th of March (with the under­stand­ing from Amazon that it would ship on the 28th of April). No such luck. I just today received con­firm­a­tion that it was shipped (3rd of May!). 

    Very poor cus­tomer ser­vice, if you ask me. Don’t prom­ise some­thing that you can’t deliver. 

    Was it worth the rebate? I don’t know.

  3. cboone said on: May 3rd, 2005 at 2:22 pm

    I had the same prob­lem (over here state-side), and I emailed Amazon to com­plain, and they promptly apo­lo­gized and sent me a dis­count coupon. A bit of a token ges­ture, but bet­ter than nothing.

  4. Graham Sanders said on: May 3rd, 2005 at 3:11 pm

    As for me I think I’ll wait a bit until I get Tiger, there’s no real rush, Pan­ther is nice and stable at the moment. Any­way with all first releases of oper­at­ing sys­tems there’s always a few bugs that need to be ironed out, roll on OS X.4.99 

    In terms of Amazon, a col­league com­men­ted that it took a while for him to receive a digital cam­era he ordered. When it arrived he didn’t sign the deliv­ery note and within a few weeks com­plained to Amazon and as there was no proof of deliv­ery he was sent a second one. A bit naughty but just goes to show the flaws of Amazon :)

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