Okay, maybe we're just overly-antsy, but we feel like if this were a cartoon, we'd be walking around with giant suckers for heads. Forty-eight hours after placing our order for the Mac OS X public beta and ponying up an extra ten bucks for FedEx shipping, we're still betaless. Not only that, but checking the status of our order through the Apple Store's (admittedly cool) order tracking system reveals that our order is still "being assembled." Being assembled? It's a freakin' CD-ROM, for crying out Pete's sake-- what, are they hand-carving each disc from a solid block of plastic or something? Tell you what, Apple-- we'll gladly forgo the fine Cupertino craftsmanship of an individually-etched unit for one of those soulless, machine-stamped CDs if it means we'll receive it before we keel over from impatience. Even if Apple ships it today, that would mean we pretty much blew $10 for nothing, since FedEx presumably wouldn't deliver until Monday and standard U.S. Mail would probably get here by then anyway.

Then again, it sounds like it probably won't ship today; a reader over at MacInTouch spent forty minutes on hold with the Apple Store to find out what was up with his beta order, and was finally told that his copy would ship "no later than next Tuesday, September 19th." The reason? "Unanticipated response." Apparently Apple had no idea that a lot of people might like to order a copy of the beta, and was utterly shocked and taken aback by the fact that the first public release of an operating system that's years overdue is actually generating some interest. Granted, it is a very heavy volume of orders-- 29,000 as of yesterday afternoon-- but still, you'd think that Apple might have prepared for something like this to happen.

So much for a weekend spent trashing our data by recklessly installing beta software without backing up first. Sigh. Guess we'll have to find some other way to get our death-wish kicks... at least until Apple's artisans catch up on their CD-whittling and ship our order.