Yes, that’s right – Travels OF a Laptop, not Travels WITH a Laptop. Let me explain.
Apple recently released a new version of one of their best-selling computers, the MacBook Pro 13″, and I was immediately tempted. I’ve been without a laptop for almost a year. I used to have a 2014 MacBook Pro which I mainly used for travel – quite apart from the whole browsing & email thing, it was good to be able to do some initial processing of images while I was still on a trip, and of course I was also able to write blog articles (both here and in the Cruise blog). However, when the time came to replace the old laptop I was seduced by the idea of using an iPad as a laptop replacement, and so I bought an 11″ iPad Pro, a Smart Folio keyboard, and an Apple Pencil. (I also part-exchanged the old laptop.)
In the event the “iPad as laptop replacement” idea didn’t work for me. Well, it worked, insofar as I was able to use it, but I didn’t get on with the key piece of software that I had to use, Lightroom Mobile. So I had been thinking of going back to a laptop anyway, and when Apple announced the 2020 13″ MacBook Pro I was interested.
Apple has improved the base specification of the new laptop over last year’s model in some areas – double the storage and an improved keyboard, for example – and for the same starting price, but I decided to enhance the spec by going for a further optional upgrade, an extra 8Gb of memory making a total of 16Gb. I knew that this was not a standard build and that therefore delivery would be slightly delayed, but I had expected that it would still come from Apple UK – my assumption was that Apple themselves must order small numbers of the various optional configurations for onward supply to customers. Not so in the case of mine!
In addition to the usual deluge of order confirmation, etc, emails that I got from Apple, I was surprised to receive a tracking notification email from UPS showing “the package” (my new laptop) starting in China – “Label created” was the first entry in the list, on 29 May. “The package” spent the rest of that day and a couple of following days in China. The first entry just said ‘China’ but subsequent ones said ‘Shanghai’. Here are steps “the package” went through:
- 29/5 to 31/5: Order Processed in China, then customs clearance and various scans in Shanghai (presumably, this location refers to a UPS facility in Shanghai);
- 1 June: a Departure Scan 😁 at Shanghai at 3am, followed by an Arrival scan at Incheon, South Korea at 5am on the same day;
- 1 June: more progress! At 7:30am there was a Departure scan at Incheon, followed by an Arrival scan at Anchorage, Alaska, at 9:25pm – date 31 May. This was initially confusing – had “the package” travelled back in time? could this be how UPS meets its deadlines? – but then I realised that the journey from South Korea to Alaska would have taken it across the International Date Line, and that’s what caused the date reversal;
- It didn’t stay long in Alaska – less than two hours later, at 11:17pm, still on 31 May, there was a departure scan from Anchorage;
- Next was was an arrival scan at Koeln (Cologne) in Germany, at 18:15pm on 1 June (again….). There’s a 9 hour time difference between Alaska and Germany, so actually it arrived in Germany just 8 or 9 hours after leaving Alaska. Interestingly, the Great Circle route between Anchorage and Cologne passes across the Arctic, so “the package” went close by the North Pole, albeit at 35,000 ft or so;
- It had an overnight stay in Germany before having an Exit scan from Koeln at 4:48am on 2 June, followed by a Departure scan at Stanford-Le-Hope at 8:48pm the same day. Stanford-Le-Hope? Well it turns out there’s a huge UPS facility near to St-L-Hope which I believe handles packages arriving both by sea at the new London Gateway container port, and by air at Stansted airport;
- After Stanford-Le-Hope came an Arrival scan at Tamworth late on 2 June followed by an Arrival scan at Sheffield early on 3 June….
- ….and finally “The Package” was delivered to me at home just before 1pm on 3 June.
So my laptop entered 5 different countries – China, South Korea, the USA, Germany and the UK – passed over several more (the Great Circle route from Alaska to Germany would include Canada, Greenland, Norway, and maybe Denmark), crossed an ocean, a pole, and the International Date Line. Not a bad trip! – I wish I’d been with it.
I found this to be an interesting insight into the world of global logistics. I was surprised that my order was being handled as a separate, discrete package, on its own – clearly, it wasn’t in a container with thousands of other Apple laptops. I discovered that the facilities at Incheon, Anchorage and Cologne are mega-hubs for their continent, and that it’s normal for packages to be routed from one such hub to another if their journey requires it; my little laptop would never have been sent from Shanghai direct to the UK. I can only imagine the cost of doing this – while I’m sure that Apple doesn’t pay the rate I would to send a 2.9kg package half-way round the world, there must have been some cost. (Which I didn’t see, btw – my order included free delivery.)
And thereby hangs a bit of a tale, perhaps. A couple of days after I’d ordered my new laptop, and had the order accepted, Apple doubled the price of the memory upgrade that I’d included, from $/£100 to $/£200. There’s no official reason for this, although it is suggested that the lower price was a mistake. Really? By Apple, the most price- and market-conscious corporation on the planet? Well, perhaps; but is it also possible that one month into the new product’s life they were finding that there were so few orders for that particular upgrade that they were having to be handled as one-offs? Increasing the price would have two effects, perhaps: a) it would increase the revenue from orders for that configuration and thus meet the shipping costs, and b) it would narrow the price difference gap between that bespoke configuration and the next standard configuration up, and thus encourage customers to order the higher-priced standard config which would always be shipped in bulk. But we’ll never know the truth.