David Gewirtz Gets a Brand-New Mac without Mavericks

Reading David Gewirtz' DIY-IT post on ZDNet this morning quickly established itself as a working definition of Schandenfreude. The premise behind his story is as follows:

As I mentioned yesterday, I ordered a brand-new, highly maxed out iMac directly from Apple. I waited until after the October 22 Apple event because I wanted to base my decision on the iMac vs. the Mac Pro on as much information as possible.

However, when he fired up the About This Mac window, he discovered that his OS X Version was 10.8.4 (which, as those who follow these things know, is not even the latest version of Mountain Lion).  The Schadenfreude really kicked in with this sentence (including the bold font of the original):

I'm still waiting for Mavericks to download from the Mac App Store.

This led to the following punch line:

Apple's attention to detail is supposed to be legendary. Maybe not so much anymore.

I rather like that word "legendary," since, it most circles, it tends to connote long-held beliefs in things that are not necessarily true. There is, of course, an "Apple of legend" rooted in the announcement of the Mac with one of the best-remembered television commercials of all time. This happened before many (most?) of today's Apple customers were born. Since ours is a culture that celebrates its ignorance of history, that legend has been dead for quite some time. The same is now true of the mythic stature of Steve Jobs.

Gewirtz chose a good punch line. However, it is not just attention to detail that is gone. Attention to larger scale factors, such as entire operating systems it an utter mess, distinguished only by the possibility that the mess may still be less than that of any of the other alternatives "for the rest of us."