Apple introduces reserve and pick-up

Gimme!!!

Wow, my Snark-meter just asploded! You'd think some of you folks might give them a pass on this considering some of the others things they do that a lot of retailers don't, you know, like being appropriately staffed and that staff being relatively knowledgeable.

Including a hunky fellow with the purchase, apparently free of charge, is very nice of Apple.

"why not just buy the product online and get it shipped, or just go to the store and buy it?"

First of all, having it shipped means I have to wait to have it. That's fine if I'm getting it for cheaper than the retail stores, but if it's the same price I'll go to the store so I can have it right away.

Secondly, this will help if you're concerned about them having what you want in the store. It would really suck to go to the store only to find they just sold out shortly before you arrived. This way, you KNOW there's a copy waiting for you when you get there.

Would be nice if this worked through the different online stores too, like the Education or the Government Employee store.

Yes - to avoid whiners like me ... :-)

Pickup would be a great idea if I didn’t have to wait a seemingly endless amount of time to pay. I’ve been to three of the Apple stores in Toronto, they’re all too busy, very hard to get anyone’s attention, when I do find someone it’s usually the wrong person and they send me somewhere else. Once this happened with a shopping appointment! It’s a lot easier just to wait for delivery.

They should call it iWRAP (we reserve apple pickups).

Doesn't seem to work in Chrome

Unrelated, but today all my iTunes LP "300 meg" files just started redownloading for no reason. Is there new copy-protection, or maybe it's a Windows 7 version?