As an early birthday/graduation gift, I have given my little sister a brand new Macbook to replace her aging Dell laptop (the laptop that I was given, brand new, when I graduated high school in 2004). I know, most will likely chalk this up as my quest to convert everyone to Macs, but I really thought she’d like this laptop and she expressed interest when looking at or using my Macs. As of right now, she seems to really like it and she is spending lots of time with it learning the new operating system and trying to organize her music and photos using iTunes and iPhoto, respectively.

This process did not come without it’s issues however. I purchased her Macbook with my education discount and received a free 8GB iPod Touch. She has just recently received an iPod Nano last year that she enjoys immensely and my roommate, Ryan, had an aging iPod Mini that he was ready to upgrade from. So, since I was getting a free iPod Touch, I decided to cut Ryan a deal on the iPod Touch which he took. I waited until after the software upgrade on the iPod Touch (to the new 2.0 software that includes the new App Store) to purchase this deal so that Ryan wouldn’t have to pay for the 2.0 software upgrade. After hooking up the iPod Touch, we found out that the iPod Touch did not include the new software. No worries, I thought it would offer us a free upgrade since we purchased the Touch after the upgrade release. No dice. We contacted Apple only to be informed that we would indeed have to purchase the upgrade since “the upgrade isn’t required. It’s a preference.” I was kind of ticked off about this, because I’m sure that if you bought a Mac after Leopard was released and the Mac you purchased still had Tiger, you’d be given the software to perform the upgrade for free. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I thought they would do this for you. Fortunately the upgrade was only $10, so it wasn’t too bad.

Anyways, Ryan is thoroughly enjoying his new iPod Touch with apps and Alex is loving her new Macbook, so at least it’s not all bad.