This amuses me

So the family iBook - the worst consumer product ever sold to an innocent public - won't take a charge anymore.

As I know all too well, we have a local Apple Store. So I was wild and crazy and paid full price for a new battery. The Apple Store did not have a charger in stock (!), but could get me one on Tuesday. (By Tuesday, I could get a half-price one through Amazon, so I did that instead.)

As long as I was down at the mall, I checked out Best Buy. Their low-end laptop is now a $400 Toshiba, one that now has DVD recording. (Last spring - the most recent occasion that the iBook had to go into the shop* - their low-end laptop was a $450 Compaq.)

Hmm, DVD recording. So I wandered over to the stand-alone DVD recorders to check them out. The Best Buy house brand was $50, marked down from $100. They had a return that they were selling for $30.

Thrty bucks for a DVD recorder. This amused me so much that I bought it, mostly with the money that I'm saving by not buying the charger at the Apple Store. I'm pretty sure that I've bought $30 DVDs already, so the idea of a $30 recorder is just hilarious.


* I think the April failure was catastrophic failure #6, possibly #7, but I've lost track without looking it up. Apple has now given me two replacement machines.