Slow UPS delivery for top of the range 27-inch, 4.0GHz with Retina 5K display

Well, I live in Italy, but want a UK-International keyboard... So hence why Apple had this not available in the shop. I actually went there, and ended up watching the Apple sales person ordering it online for me :-)

But when I had my iPhone 6 delivered, there was no such long time where the parcel got stuck...

I never thought I would get help from any Apple user, but I started many moons ago with an Apple Macintosh Classic, and since spent enough $£€ to be hugely disappointed by the 2014 delivery 'standard' Apple is offering to it's customers. I am sure I am not alone, and there are many others out there with the same bad customer experience Apple 'delivers'...

What a poor customer service experience by Apple.

I ordered the iMac on the 3rd of November and received the following estimate:

Ready for shipment: 7-10 working days

Delivery: November 19, 2014 - November 24, 2014

I then received another email on the 17th of November (on the last day it should have been ready for shipment!) with a new shipment date: 26 November 2014 26/11/2014 (That means they added 7 working days to their estimate of 7-10 working days, what a great first estimate.)

This was followed up on the 22nd of November with a new delivery date: 1st of December. (That is almost 2 weeks after the original delivery date.)

Basically it will take UPS to ship the iMac from China to Rome about 10 days for a product that was bought directly with Apple online (so they had not to share the charges with any other shop) where I spent about €4.500.

All I am saying is that this is one of the poorest delivery experiences I had in my life, and nothing had ever taken so long. And yes, Apple is responsible for this and not any of the third-party they are using since I gave my money to Apple and not anyone else for this iMac - They advertise this with Free Shipping, but forget to mentioned that this is the lowest shipping category possible to choose, and there is no other option offered at all.

Apple claims that here are several options available for express delivery, but the key word in this offer lies in where available...:

Scheduled delivery with express delivery services.

Where available you can choose a scheduled delivery method for each item on your order. Refer to the below to find out about these options and how much they cost:

• Express delivery - £8
  1-3 days after dispatch
• Pre-noon delivery - £12
  1-3 days after dispatch, delivered before noon
• Pre-9:30am delivery - £15
  1-3 days after dispatch, delivered before 9:30am
• Evening delivery - £15
  1-3 days after dispatch, delivered between 5:00pm and 9:00pm
• Saturday delivery - £18
  3-8 days after dispatch, delivered on a Saturday

Since they knew they are late in production by taking almost twice as long as promised during the order process, they could have upgraded the delivery, or at least offered the option...

And I just now received a notice form UPS: Shanghai, China - 25/11/2014 - 16:18 - We were unable to load the package on the plane as scheduled.

What a poor customer service experience by Apple.

You are a genius, firstly Apple doesn't allow to cancel an order while it is in shipment (so I woudl have to wait anyway since my last name is not Rockefeller before I could by 'something else'...), secondly what other options are out there, that would come close to the new iMac with 27-inch with Retina 5K display, 4.0GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz, 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x8GB, 1TB Flash Storage, AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB GDDR5 ???

Csound1, thank you ever so much for your ever so helpful, clever, and supporting suggestions.

Sorry Csound1, but the attitude comes all from yourself. Or do you really consider any of your comments as helpful? I find/found your responses most annoying!