500 MacBook Pros in one room!
 

I figured my fellow Mac faithful would get a kick out of this. When a truck filled with 500 MacBook Pros, mint in box, rolled up to unload where I work, I grabbed a video camera to go watch.

Seriously, when do you see this many Macs in one place, outside of a warehouse? I really wanted to adopt about... a dozen of them.

http://digg.com/apple/Amazing_School...on_truck_Video

That’s pretty impressive, Weebmac!!
Welcome to the Forum! :)

Friggin nice.

I'm beginning to lust after the 15in Macbook Pro again...even though I am typing to you guys on one now...Why? I dunno.

I swear, there's nothing like opening a brand-spanking-new MacBook Pro to brighten your day. I had a gigantic grin on my face as I walked out of the Apple Store with my MacBook Pro...

Ah the memories, rekindled by a little video :)

A PowerBook grin
 

I must have hade a similar grin when my 17" PowerBook G4 was finally delivered to the door of my father-in-law on Cape Cod.

For almost a week before that, however, I was really nervous and had to sweat! We were only there for 1.5 weeks. I had pre-paid, wiring $3200 (I believe) to MacWarehouse, since they would not accept a VISA registered abroad. (As in the Bruce Willis commercials, it’s only "the future" that takes VISA, not online stores on another continent!)

When my PB wasn’t waiting for me upon arrival as promised, and didn’t arrive that first weekend either, I called them. "You’re in queue. They are scheduled to ship in 3–4 weeks." said the voice calmly.

I nearly went ballistic! On the third day of calling MacWareHouse I finally got through to a high-enough-up-the-latter manager that she was qualified to think for herself. Fortunately I convinced her that it wouldn’t do me much good for the PowerBook to arrive on Cape Cod after I’d gone back to Europe.

And that furthermore it would be in breach of crystal-clear email confirmations from them, which she pulled up on screen. She took a PB from the queue and sent it.

...and the next day I could open the box with a HUGE grin on my face. :D
I called the manager back to say Thank You.

That was just shy of four years ago. But I still often wear a smile of satisfaction when I sit down with my PowerBook. :)


-- ArcticStones

I wonder what kind of discount you get on 500 MBP's!

I used to work in an Apple repair depot. We serviced Henrico County Public Schools.

Every summer, we would "refresh" all of their units: blanket repairs, reimaging, retagging. All of them. That meant that we needed to get them all into one building so we could manage everything, which was okay, since it was summer and the students didn't have the machines during the break. Imagine walking into a building and seeing 25,000 iBooks at once. And then 1,500 iBook G4s show up on a truck one morning. ;)

No, I wouldn’t think the sight of that yields the same degree of satisfaction. :p

"depair depot"? Was that a Freudian slip, a hybrid between repair and despair?

Fixed.

Though, I suppose that assumes it wasn't a slip . . .

That must have been... a really, really fun job. Floor-to-ceiling Macs? Just something warm and fuzzy about that image. The one thing that was sad about receiving all these at work was that they were hidden under a skin of brown cardboard, so you didn't get hit with the full effect right up front.

Maybe safer that way.

At least for all the Macs. ;)

Nope, they were not covered. Little white iBooks, stacked five-high. Except they weren't little white iBooks; they were little abused dingy iBooks.

As for fun, working in a high-volume repair depot taught me a ridiculous amount about unit testing and troubleshooting . . . but it was not necessarily "fun".

Oh, I had similar problems...when I called the Apple Store the day before I walked in and got my MacBook Pro, They said they were running out of 15'' Glossy and Matte models. Hearing this, I tempted fate, showed up the next day, and then another problem hit--when my grandfather used his credit card. It was denied, and I was going postal. Turns out that his credit card provider thought it was a fraudlent purchase (Who wouldn't? It was $2500...). Thankfully, the employees were kind, allowed us to use their phone to call his credit card provider and clear the purchase. I then walked out of the store with my brand-new Glossy screened MBP.

I've kind of regretted buying a glossy model, but I keep hearing about really horrible screen quality on the Matte models, so I guess I dodged a bullet there.

My matte MBP screen looks nice.

Is it a C2D model? Because on the Apple forums, there was a ton of posts about the Matte screen looking grainy.

that video gives me goosebumps. reminds me at work when they fed ex buy dumps off 500 gateway laptops for me to image and deploy. Unpack all of them, stack them on the shelf, toss the software in the trash and toss the ac adpater in a bucket. Then take like 15 at a time and start imaging them.............

I work IT for a school district so I get to do all that stuff over the summer! We have about 9 to 10 thousand computers, its going to be awesome and I can't wait! /sarcasm

Imagine this scenario:

You know you're going to have to image 25,000 computers. There are 22 different images to deploy. You've got a deadline, but you also have to wait for the final images from the school system. The school system waits until you're less than a month away from deadline to provide you with the images you need.

Doing some math, you discover that you have to image 1,200 machines per day to hit the deadline. And you don't get multicast ASR. And one out of every 10 units fails for some reason on the imaging bench.

It was fun setting that up. I feel your pain, dude.

First-generation, Core Duo.

Now, I don't know if there's a problem with MBP displays or not, but:

Apple Discussions is a wasteland. User reports are generally terribly written and thought-out; too often does one encounter misinformed, sub-standard, or otherwise bad advice (so many people pray to the gods of permissions repair there that it's mind-boggling); and threads become noise faster than you can turn around. It's just gotten worse since they got rid of the moderation team.

Agreed with the bad-advice thing on the Apple Discussions. That, and all those people and their point-greed.

The C2D MacBook Pro Matte screens were reported to have quality issues. Uneven backlighting, graininess, etc. There was a gigantic thread in the MacBook Pro support forum that got so huge, that an Apple employee deleted it, and it was resurrected again.

The CD MacBook Pros do not have this problem, as far as I read.

And I bet they all cried "CENSORSHIP!!1", when in reality, it was probably just ranting and noise. People forget that Discussions is a tech support forum, nothing else:

http://mikey-san.net/damage/archives...t_herding.html

(The linked article's not there anymore, but you get the idea.)

I was once discussing how to change an admin password in windows on another computer help forum and the thread got locked. So I started to question the mods about this. What I posted was in no way a hack or exploit against windows (even though anyone who can use google can exploit windows) it was a way to use built in features to wipe out the admin password in case your forgot it. Which required you to be logged in as admin in the first place. The mod of the forum obviously did not know what I was talking about and kept telling me I was giving out information on how to exploit windows. I even sent him a link of the official MS knowledge base article that explained what I was doing. I mean if your user account is already an admin account then you already have rights to change passwords, duh!

Long story short I don't post there anymore and I got two offical warnings on my account (whatever that means) because I proved a mod wrong, in a very polite and civil manner I may point out.

Then again when most of your forum's mods are 18 and younger on a computer forum things like that tend to happen. Oh well, guess I am to suffer not giving out my free professional advice that I usually charge for anyways. Yup I am at a loss on this one!:rolleyes:

Windows forums suck. All of them. For every poorly written post here, or one using l33t, there are a couple billion on Windows forums.
</rant>

Agreed.

Or if you own both Mac and PCs, you get flamed off the board.(Macs sux OMG)

Yeah i pretty much ignore any elitist for any platform. I think they all have their ups and downs. There are things I love about windows and things I hate, and vice versa for every OS I have ever tried.

Right tools for the right job.

Except you can't help but poke fun at Vista. No one can.

Let's not turn this into a thread where we take shots at Windows. The door swings both ways:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20020712l.gif

(This is the second PA strip I've posted in the last week. Hmm.)

I am so printing this out and hanging it up above my workstation at my office on monday!

i thought this was funny: the vista bashing is seriously worldwide already:

http://www.isohunt.com/forum/images/...395396ee89.png

It kills me every time I read it. It's like some magical nexus where truth and comedy combine to form awesome.

As much as I hate to say, Mikey's right. Mac users can be etlist jerks. I'm no exception ;)

Yeah, well, you smell like butt. :P

Thought you guys would appreciate an update:

The MacBooks Pro from the video have been reaching the students at the school where I work. It's pretty cool and inspiring. I wrote a post about it, so give it a digg if seeing Apple kick ass in education makes you feel good.

http://digg.com/apple/Major_gains_in...able_this_time