As many of you know, Henrico county had a great Apple iBook deal on the 16th of August. For $50, you could buy a used G3 White iBook. 10 gigabite hard drive, 500mhz processer, 320 megabites of ram, and it runs Mac OS 10.2. Wow, totally worth it, espacily since these laptops go for $300 bucks on ebay. I first saw this on digg.com in the middle of July. I was super excited, I had a plan, I had my route set up through Google Maps, my dad even took a day off of work just so we could leave at midnigt and get there around 4:00 in the morning. Every day the anticipation was building, and then through Thunder Bird came the link saying that the date has changed, and now it will only be open to residents of Henrico County. I was upset, and now had to resort to paying in full for my next computer. I ended up just forgetting about it. Now that the day has passed I am glad I didnt go at all.

It turns out that people started showing up at around 1:30 in the morning. From then until 7:00AM a total of 12,000 residents of Henrico County showed up and where waiting in a half mile long line to get to the gates. There where only 1000 laptops available. As soon as the gates opende, a stampede of people ran past the security, into the building, and ran for their laptops. Imagine if they had left it open to even those outside of Henrico.

“This is total, total chaos,” said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.

One women even wet herself so she could keep her place in line. What is it about these deals that drive people insane. People were gettiing trampled, and hurt, and many at the front of the line didnt get a laptop at all. The security did not do the job correctly and the county should have known that all of these people would come. In my opinion, there should have been a small advertisment in the Henrico County Paper, about 5 days ago. No crowd, no worrys, no problems.

Video of the Madness.. they rele dont seem to care about the 11,000 other people that never got their laptops.
More on the iBook deal.
via Engadget
via Gizmodo
via Local Henrico Affilate
via Richmond.com
via the Mac Observer
If you have anything to add, or agree or disagree with something, post a comment or send me an e-mail at hosvos@gmail.com. I have gotten alot of comments recently, so if anyone wants to see more or less of something on the blog, just send me an e-mail.