Just rediscovered a site I had put in my blogroll a while back but haven’t been visiting lately, codepoetry. In reading the author (name? who knows, no about link I could see.. bad blogger!) has some interesting points on how apple can increase market share. In short, by eliminating “Mac only” stores. While it’s cool that places that are mac only exist, the sad part is that they seem the only place one can get a decent view of apple hardware and software. In the area here, there are at least a couple in Vancouver, and one in Maple Ridge.
In Abbotsford the only place you will see new Apple stuff (there is a used store) is in either London Drugs or Future Shop, and the sum total of Apple hardware there consists of:
- One iBook
- Two iPods (one old style, one new, both 10G)
- Two iMacs
- One G4 tower
- One LCD panel display
… and all but one of those iMacs was in London Drugs. Yet you go into the Apple store and there are tons of computers, displays, hardware, software….. it’s great. Even if it’s more expensive than x86 hardware, part of the Apple appeal is simply that it’s a hell of a lot sexier than anything the x86 world has to offer, and that fact alone would probably suck people in when seeing the two sets of hardware side by side (even with the price difference). Of course, that would require stores to carry apple software (hehehe, sorry, didn’t mean to giggle there) and all the other stuff, or else they are caught in the trap that no doubt a lot of stores like LD are now, where they have just the hardware and have to send people elsewhere, or convert them to x86 hardware, as they have all the periferals, software, and accessories right there.
Oh, and just to piss off Tig I’ll point to his post on not testing anymore with IE. I don’t totally agree mind you, because I get pissed off when people don’t take a few minutes to test their site in the “other” browser, and it ends up looking like crap and can be fixed easily. Mind you, it’s been a while since I have found a site that doesn’t look fine in whatever browser I’m using (mozilla, ie, opera, safari…).