Be Careful What You Wish For

Last week Apple announced new PowerBooks. The appeal for me. Built in DVD writer – aka the Apple SuperDrive. Sure the benefits of 30GB more hard drive, a gig of RAM and of course a 1Ghz processor. Not that there is anything wrong with my existing Titanium PowerBook that I bought last November. But I dreamed. Planned. my trusty old powerbookAnd then figured hmmmm, if I sold my TiBook for “bluebook” or perhaps a bit more with some of the goodies I’ve added, that I could justify to myself that I’d be buying a PowerBook for significantly less than “full retail”. So I go and post my PowerBook on eBay. To be sure, I’d set my limit. And in fact, I purposely posted a higher reserve price for the machine. Not that I cared that in the past week several computers with the same specs as mine were selling for $100-$200 less than my reserve price. If someone wanted this, they’d pay a reasonable price for it. But I reasoned. No one would buy it at that price. Auction closed last night. You know what? It sold for $50 more than the reserve price. Shit. The reality of transferring, reconfiguring and packing and shipping this computer hit me like the noise on the floor of Comdex.

So I go online to order my new PowerBook. Reality wham again. My quoted ship date? 4-5 weeks. Shit, again. You know the moral to the story. And I know I’ll be waiting. And perhaps to the delight of my family, I won’t be bringing my computer to South Dakota for our family Thanksgiving get together.