After my experiences of Wednesday I wonder how Apple sell any new products.

We took a trip to central Ottawa to view the new MacBook and MacBook Pro products at Henrys – the nearest, largest store that Apple says sells Macintosh products, rather than just iPods. Henry’s website indicates that the products were in stock in Ottawa. Goody.

Until we got there: on display was an iBook G4, a 17” Powerbook G4, an iMac and a couple of Cinema Displays. But no MacBooks. I spoke to one of the store’s employees: a really friendly, approachable and knowledgeable guy named Louis-Philippe. He said that they did have them in stock, but they were not on display because they didn’t have enough to put out on display. Huh? Later I discovered that the concept of ‘in stock’ meant ‘we can get them from our store in Toronto in a couple of days’. Right. You’re in the capital city of your country and you don’t have any MacBooks.

My Uncle wanted to buy an MP3 player. Louis-Philippe tried to sell him a 30GB or 60GB iPod, but he wants to play classical music. I recommended a 4GB iPod because these flash-based iPods are more suited to lengthy pieces of music and the capacity is closer to the size of his music collection. In stock? No. Only in Kanata, where they had two black 4GB iPods.

So we drove back home towards Kanata and picked up an iPod. Charger? Nope. Out of stock. But then most of the Kanata employees seemed clueless about iPods and clueless about how to ring up the sale on the till. Still, they have a whole wall dedicated to photo paper for printers. Hmm.