AEJ and I did some rather spontaneous shopping on Thursday. We kind of accidentally bought a new computer.

On Tuesday, Apple announced new consumer laptops (as opposed to their “pro” laptops, now called Macbook Pro). AEJ called around to find out what stores had the new MacBook on display, and having located some, we headed to the Apple Store at the Beverly Center. The Apple Store there is nice and calm. The Beverly Center is one of those malls that, as far as I can tell, used to be really nice — and crowded. Now everybody goes to The Grove, the fancy newer mall that looks like a village and where you might actually see it snow in LA.

So we headed out to the Beverly Center, and they did, as promised, have the new MacBook on display. It’s a very cute machine, available in glossy white or matte black. The keyboard is Chicklet-style, and feels somehow retro. Under the hood (on the top model) is a 2 GHz dual core Intel processor — basically meaning it has two 2 GHz processors on a single chip. (For those who didn’t know this, Macs now run on Intel processors. You can even boot them directly into Windows, if, for some reason, you hate yourself.)

We played with the white model for a few minutes, but they didn’t have a black one in stock, as they’d sold out within minutes of putting them on sale that morning. One of the sales guys heard us talking about the black one, though, and said that he had one in back. It wasn’t for sale, but he was willing to bring it out so we could see it in person. This is why the Apple Store at the Beverly Center is our favorite Apple Store. (That, and because when AEJ’s iMac died a few months ago, the tech at that store’s Genius Bar told AEJ how to get it fixed for free, even though it was out of warranty. Turns out that she had an extra year of warranty on it because she’d bought it with an AmEx. So, thank you to Aaron for pointing that out, and saving us $928.)

Well, the black one was sweet. As I said, though, they were sold out. So the next morning, AEJ got on the phone and called around to the local stores again to see if any of them had received a shipment of black models. Turned out that the store at The Grove had a bunch — enough that the guy on the phone figured we could come anytime within the next few hours, and we’d get one. We left right away, and we were there in 20 minutes, and by then, they only had one left. These things are selling like mad, it seems.

We bought one and brought it home. Loki was pretty curious about it, as he’d never seen such a small computer box.

With Apple, even the boxes are nice.

The handsome protective styrofoam.

The laptop’s remote, so you can control music and DVD playback from across the room.

Can you see it? I know, it’s hard! It almost disappears on AEJ’s black pants!

And hooray — it works!

We actually did have one scare on Thursday when we tried to install the new RAM. Even though we thought we’d pressed as hard as we possibly could, the RAM apparently wasn’t seated properly, and the machine appeared to be dead. AEJ used her tremendous strength, though, and managed to get it all the way in, and since then, the machine has been great.