Apple exchange policy and 10% restocking fee?

I bought a 2.16 c2d macbook pro a few days ago and have been comfortable using a notebook of this size (last two notebooks have been 12.1" and 13.3"). Now I would like to exhange this 2.16 macbook for the 2.33 macbook pro for its extra hardware such as the faster processor, higher video ram, and more system ram. I want to have this notebook for the long run so having better hardware is beneficial to me.

Will apple let me pay the difference for the higher model without paying the 10% restocking fee? Since I purchased this during the Christmas time, apple allows an extra week in its 14 day return policy.

 

I'm not sure how they handle their returns.
You know, you will only see about a 2-3% difference between the two processors. It's pretty much... negligable.
Do you do a lot of gaming? If you do, it would make sense to get that upgrade for the video card. Not many games have large enough textures where the extra ram really helps alot, but they are out there and more coming out every day it seems.

Best thing to do is call them up ASAP. I'm sure if you told them you want to go to a higher model, they would be okay with not charging you. It would only make sense. They'd would still make some good money off that unit selling it as a refurb.

Good luck to ya!

 

I would be surprised if they still wanted to nail you with a restocking fee if you are looking to upgrade. However, as hallownail said, there really is not a huge difference between the two. I think Apple made a mistake by giving the low end Apple so many features. They should have held the hard drive back and maybe cut the DL burner and FW800. That way the 2.33 doesn't look so overpriced. I mean you pay $500 for a processor bump(negligible), RAM (cost $100 aftermarket) and more VRAM (again kind of negligible). Seems like the made the low end too good a deal.

 

The low-end model is probably fine as it is since competition is quite fierce from other notebook makers so it has to be configured to be competitive. Obviously it isn't directly competing against cheap low-end Dells, but the value aspect of Dell laptops certainly would have an effect on the higher-end market that Apple tends to represent.

It's true that the lowend MBP is a great value, but Apple did kind of cripple it by only giving it a 128MB of GDDR3 which is really the only thing holding it back compared to computers in it's price range.

I do agree that the 2.33GHz MBP doesn't seem like that good a value in comparison, but Apple could improve it by throwing in a 160GB HDD instead of taking away from the 2.16GHz MBP. I'm hoping that Apple will announce a BTO for the low-end model to upgrade to 256MB of GDDR3 too.

 

Thx for the feedback, I will call apple and see what they can do. However, now that I think of it, the extra video memory is the only thing that makes a significant difference between the two machines. The ram is upgradable and the cpu is only incrementaly faster.