SUXOR! They denied my friend because he had already sent in the UPC for his printer rebate. They would still do it, but they wouldn't waive the restocking fee.
This is why you never, ever, ever send in the rebate right away. Always wait until the return period has ended. All rebates give you around 14-30 days after purchase to postmark your rebate, and it often coincides with the return period. Take advantage of it!
Rebates and build to order = ways Apple is able to go back on their own policies. It happened to my problem prone BTO ibook, and all I got custom was airport!
1. Go back on their policies how? If it's a custom build, there's no guarantee someone else will want the same thing. Special orders tend to involve special policies. That goes for anything you can customize, even beyond computers.
2. What's the problem here? The MacBook Pro he bought last week is just as serviceable to him as it was the day he bought it. I bought my MBP a couple months ago knowing full well that some updates were coming... didn't matter to me, my MBP did and still does work fine.
At worst, your friend MIGHT have something to gripe about if he's doing a lot of 3D intensive work, i.e. game playing or modelling, or perhaps video editing. Real world tests are showing the the new hardware is just marginally better in performance with standard apps, and with certain games its anwyhere from about equal to at most, 25% better.
If anything, the only complaint he might have is that it isn't the absolute newest thing that Apple has ever made, but then most people aren't even going to realize that because the hardware looks identical on the outside. His MBP isn't obsolete and won't be for quite some time. I USED to have the same "it's gotta be new and curse Apple for releasing new stuff every six months!" mentality, but after seeing our Apple hardware at work continue to be quite serviceable since January 2002, I'm seeing that unlike the Windows way of doing things, non-current-model doesn't mean osolete on this platform. And we're planning on installing Leopard on it when it comes out, knowing it might actually IMPROVE performance.
Contrast that to my Windows machine, built just six months ago and just barely able to run Vista's Aero interface. I spent less on the Windows machine, but I'd have to say my Apple hardware has been a better investment so far.
While it's a bummer he didn't get the newest hardware as of this very second, your friend's MBP still isn't obsolete, and won't be for quite some time.
