In regards to MacSA's post, is TextEdit still *fast* in Tiger? I find it frustrating that text editors in systems always get feature laden and slow.... This is as someone who has Word on the computer, already, natch. In that case, I don't need a lot of features in something like TextEdit, but I want it to open and close lightning-fast with small documents. I found it really annoying in Windows that the simpler text editor (notepad?) had a cap on file size that was small enough to frequently necessitate the larger, slower one (wordpad?)....
But anyways, back to the topic, I don't think its an excuse for salespeople at electronics stores misleading you, but I try never to buy anything at an in-person electronics store, except the ones that are small high-end kind of shops, without having already gotten there knowing as much as humanly possible about what I want. Even in those small stores, where I think it is safe to ask for advice, I usually don't buy without trying to get external confirmation of the advice. The information is too readily available about computers, in particular. There are so many reviews, commentaries, forum posts and blogs about computers, especially Apples, and it's so easy to get confirmation, that passing the chance seems ... less than optimal. Especially if I were buying a $2800 computer. That's not exactly an impulse buy, or a newbies' buy. Newbies don't need $2800 computers...they're much better off with iBooks. People who do need such computers ought to know enough about them to not have this kind of issue -- if not pre-purchase, at least soon after purchase. To me, buying such an expensive computer and being spec-ignorant, etc, is sort of like buying a $50k sports car and complaining that it's a PITA to use for getting groceries, because it doesn't have grocery nets in the trunk and it doesn't have a DVD player to occupy the kids.
But, that's not an excuse for being lied too -- its just a reason why you shouldn't put yourself in that position. There are always store employees who have every opportunity to know information, but who operate in a culture of not caring about providing it to customers, or misleading them, in too many computer stores. I think people like ladyvolcc and appleretailguy are the exception to that rule, rather than evidence against it, but that Apple stores have a much better culture about this than Best Buy or Circuit City.
for the i's. A very nice off-the-top-of-ones'-head list. 
