I've ordered a new MacPro from the Belfast Apple store on the 12th of March. I was told 4-6 days. I was tracking it online and was curious on the 16th that it said it was still not shipped. I called Apple and was told it could be 4-6 days to ASSEMBLE and another 5-7 to SHIP; unacceptable. No one could tell me what was going on ( I had my suspicions though. . .B/O). I called again on the 18th and was told the same thing, "but shirley after a week it has been assembled?". No it hadn't and it still had to be shipped.
This is where it gets good. I'm in the north, Northern Ireland which is a part of the UK (although you have to wonder sometimes), the MACS are assembled in the south, Cork, Ireland (ROI) which is a separate country. After the Macs are made (ROI) the are shipped back to mainland England, then shipped back to Northern Ireland. WTH? So my new MacPro will have the carbon footprint of Illinois? Sheese, not a smart way to run a company. I don't understand why it can't be shipped direct, over land only, to me in Northern Ireland? When I asked them they said it need to get AppleCare attached to it. Huh? A box that says AppleCare on the outside with basically nothing inside it? You're shipping a 40lb Mac across to England just so AppleCare can be shipped with it? So I had to ask, " why not just ship it separate or have a copy in the store?". They told me since it will be drop shipped to my house, the store has nothing more to do with it. Unbelievable.

r

As Basil Fawlty would say, "Typical! Absolutely typical!"

Welcome to the modern world! It's the same thing here. If I mail a letter to my neighbour, it'll travel about 140 km before it reaches his mailbox. If you use the tracking methods provided by Fedex, DHL, TNT, UPS and friends, you'd be very surprized by the zig-zag route taken by your packages.

Such is life. We could go on about apples (real ones, not computers) being shipped from places like Chile to Canada, although I'm sure the Chilean farmers appreciate it.

BTW, I heard about a case once where a letter was mailed from the US to another address in the US... it took four months to arrives and had been postmarked - twice - in Vietnam.

Still, shipping from Cork to England to Northern Ireland doesn't make a lot of sense.

Mike.

I agree this is crazy. On the green front though, how much packaging has apple saved by basically eliminating cd's in the music world? Itunes may be the single green-ist invention ever

I admit, I raised an eyebrow a couple of weeks ago when I tracked my Mac Pro delivery.
Ordered in Switzerland, the tracking info told me it had been shipped from assembly in Cork to Geneva, then onto Zurich to clear customs, then back to Northampton, UK for some reason, then on to the Netherlands & finally to me in Zurich.