Ashley loves shopping, especially when I buy things! This week we headed to the Bullring and to Apple's central Birmingham store. Unlike most of the people in there (who were just there to browse, gaze longingly at the new macbooks, set off the alarms by pulling the ipods just a little too far from their docks, and generally get in the way), we were actually going to buy something...

The day got off to an interesting start; it wasn't very wet, although Ashley claimed he got a bit damp in the morning. Both of us had hospital appointments, but at different hospitals - Ashley at the one in Coventry with his knee, and me at the one that is about as much in Coventry as Warwick University but in the other direction: The University Hospital at Walsgrave. Oh yes, for a hearing test.

For the morning, I had a hotdesk in the Coventry office of the nameless corporation for whom I work, and on leaving at 11am to catch a number 27 to the hospital met up with Ashley, who had been ordered to the Walsgrave for x-rays... somehow the hospital in Coventry manages to survive without an x-ray department. So we climbed aboard at stand T (the bus station has new digital departure boards better than those at the railway station!), and headed off on the 45 minute journey to the hospital, which took around 30 minutes.

Ashley and I had our tests, and I got a rough result - which is that I've lost the top end, 6kHz - 8kHz are rather down, but otherwise fairly normal. So we headed back on the 27 home for a quick pizza lunch. A few days later I received a letter calling me back for another hearing test... and have to get my ears syringed first! 0_o as Ashley would say.

Anyway, I digress...

I decided to buy a shiny new aluminium MacBook, released the previous day. Along with this I bought the 3 year warranty, and we got Ashley a green iPod nano and a printer for which we can claim rebates. All of this with Ashley's 14% student discount. Hooray!

Remembering last time, we had concerns about buying the laptop from a shop and getting it back home; a problem which was compounded by the box having a big image of what is inside splashed across its side. So we cunningly took a large reusable bag4life from Sainsburys along with us ti hide it away.

We arrived and, battling our way through the crowds, had a little play on a display model before approaching a gentleman, who turned out to be the suspiciously young looking manager, and asking to buy one. He passed us off to an enormously tall and quite crazy, in a nice way, chap, who talked through what we wanted, pretended they might not have any, then ran off out the back to find our new toys, while we had a sit down at the bar.

While he was away I had a look in the software for Adobe CS4, but they didn't have any copies... so I'm stuck editing the website in raw code for the moment... :|

In what ways was he crazy? I hear you cry. I wonder if I can use an interrobang on these blogs... best not try or I'll end up playing for ages. Anyways:

When he brought out the iPod, Ashley spotted a mark on the side, and the gentleman serving us took the iPod out of its' box and wiped the smudge off, commenting that it was probably caused by 'greasy Chinese hands'. This is only one of several examples, but I will save the rest.

Everything with Apple seems to ooze style and quality, even down to the packaging. I peeled off the security sticker, as Ashley's blog on the matter suggested he struggled with his, but then he told me off for not cutting it as now the box has a sticky patch. The packaging was very different - they'd shrunk it down to fit as small a box as possible.

After taking lots of photographs, I finally opened the macbook and booted it up. All very shiny.

Once online we set up the printer, which took a while to calibrate itself, and then print off the rebate forms to send of Special Delivery to Apple to get our moneys back.

So, what's left niggling me other than the absence of Dreamweaver and other useful website editing software? Well, they've changed the plug for video output, so we'll need to buy yet another adapter in order to connect it up to the TV. Also, it didn't come with an Apple Remote, which the last one did, which is a little annoying - but I suppose without the computer connection it's not going to matter that much. There's no firewire port, which is most bizarre - it doesn't really matter as my external hard drive can do USB2.0 as well, but Ashley keeps going on about it. And finally, something we didn't realise until the evening - there's no backlight on the keyboard :( This funky new feature, we discovered after reading lots of Apple small print, is only available on the above model.

As I can't end on a negative note, it has the funkiest new trackpad gestures - I can drag four fingers up to see the desktop, and four fingers down to see all my open windows... and it has play/pause, rewind and fast-forward buttons on the keyboard, which is something I always thought was silly to miss off Ashley's.

All in all, after a couple of days, I am happy. There are a few things I still want to get for it, such as Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks... then I can do some more playing with the website!