In-Store Vs Online Purchase

[MILESAR]

I am on my way to purchasing a PB (my first personal mac after working with them for a long time now, this is 7 years in the making) and the choice comes to me to either purchase online, or goto an apple store.

Heres the catch...

1) I live in a small Colorado town, thus no Apple store (there is a dealer, but are unable to award education discounts) So no store to buy from here.

2) Im out of town for a week in March (River trip, yay) and there is a good possibilty of the PB to arrive during that time if ordered online.

3) I am visiting my parents in Houston the weekend after that, so I have the option of buying a PB from the Houston Apple store.

Anyone know of and major advantages/disadvantages of each? I dont think I will be getting any BTO's for it (by the way what does BTO mean?). But what if I wanted too, is that an option from the shop?

There is the Possibility of the PB arriving before I head down to Houston, but buying from the store there is no wait between spending money and play time.

Any thoughts would be great, Thanks.

[Phatpat]

BTO = Build to order.

Compare sales tax in Houston with your Small Colorado town. If Houston is less, buy there.

[Chrispy]

Speaking from personal experience, I would have to say I would recommend buying in a store if you are getting anything with an LCD screen. I had a terrible expereince with trying to get a working powerbook. The first 3 of them that I received had a bad screen. Two of them had dead pixels and the other had the screen going dark on the left side. I had to fight REALLLLY hard with apple every time to get them to send me a replacement. If you are in the store you can check out the powerbook before you buy it. However, many people on these forms have great luck purchasing online so I may be a minority here. Just my opinion :)

[dornoforpyros]

I dunno. Personally with me when I ordered my G5 I ended up cancelling order simply because I couldn't handle waiting 1-2 weeks for it. So I bought my G5 powermac in store and added ram I ordered from crucial. Like enless your going for blue tooth there's really nothing done though BTO that you can't do yourself. I plan on ordering a 250gb drive later compared to the 160 I had ordered.