I’m vaguely hunt­ing for a lap­top. Well, okay, a lit­tle more than vaguely – but as they’re reput­edly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that ser­vice as a pur­chas­ing vehi­cle is less than certain.

Soft­ware piracy also fea­tures… but, of course, there seems to be lit­tle that can be done to actu­ally report this (if eBay have a “Report vio­la­tion” link, it’s ade­quately hid­den from me). Observe this ques­tion from ear­lier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor and Inde­sign, and MS Office for Mac included:

Me: Does this come with orig­i­nal CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe soft­ware?
Seller: No.

(Yeah, that was full­text of the ques­tion + answer!)

And on another list­ing (I didn’t ask the ques­tion on this one!) adver­tised as includ­ing iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:

Q: Are you sell­ing the soft­ware disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the soft­ware, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be send­ing the lap­top and its power cable. Thanks.

Sigh.

(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not con­vinced I want a Mac lap­top any­more. In fact, I’d prob­a­bly pre­fer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)