Whilst watching the Special Event on Wednesday evening (here in the UK) I was very curious about the new 11-inch MacBook Air. Within 30 minutes of the event finishing I’d ordered one. It was an impulse buy that I’m not regretting! The only two little niggles I have is the lack of SD slot and no Backlit Keyboard, I like a Backlit Keyboard.

I went for the 128GB FLASH version, which is the top end 11-inch model. When I first saw the spec I thought a 1.4GHz CPU was a bit paltry, and I was a bit miffed it still only had 2GB of RAM. Anyone who’s used Snow Leopard will know, 4GB is pretty much a minimum these days. To my surprise, on checking out I noticed a few BTO options, namely a 1.6GHz CPU and a 4GB RAM upgrade. These were immediately ticked. I was shocked to see this only changed the ship date to 3 days. In the past my BTO options usually delayed it by over a week.

So now I just sit back and wait, hopefully by this time next week I could be typing a blog post on my new Apple, dare I say, Netbook!

I ordered this machine on the 16th of December knowing there was a 2 week lead time on them. For the first few days I was constantly checking the tracking hoping a miracle would happen and I’d have it before Christmas. I was wrong. I got the ‘Shipped’ email off Apple late on Christmas Eve (24th Dec) which was a week earlier than they had initially quoted. I was pleased and was hoping I’d have it in my hands before the new year kicked off. I kept checking the status online, but had still not been given a tracking number. I went through the usual antics of using Apple’s delivery reference number on a host of courier websites (TNT, UPS etc) but to no avail.

After a phone call to Apple they told me to expect my tracking number on the 4th of January. So yesterday came and went without any sign of an email, I phoned again. This time the representative told me my Mac was on schedule for a 7th of Jan delivery. I asked him regarding the tracking number and he said I won’t get one until the carrier in the UK pick it up! So basically I hear nothing until the day of delivery! I think this is shocking by Apple. I’ve been reading various online forum posts regarding shipment of their i7 iMacs. Many people in the USA have had their orders before me even though they didn’t order until late December! Not only that, they had full tracking info all the way from Shanghai to their front door.

Let me just say, I’m hoping and praying I don’t get a machine with any of the following symptoms

• Yellow tainted screen
• Dead pixels
• Grumbling Hard Drive
• Flickering & Blackout issues
• iSight with dead pixels
• Cracked Glass