Remember yesterday's conspiracy theory, in which we surmised that the CompUSA salon-store deal was more than a little connected to this recent exodus of other national retailers from the Mac market? Well, AtAT isn't the only show on the air who is paranoid brave enough to tell what's really going on behind closed doors: O'Grady's PowerPage, Powerbook site extraordinaire, reports that in addition to Best Buy and Computer City, Circuit City and Sears are also packing up their Macs and calling it a day. And the PowerPage also mentions that this turn of events is in fact part of Apple's deal with CompUSA.

In fact, according to one of their readers, the agreement is very similar to the theory we mentioned yesterday. CompUSA, so the story goes, is now the exclusive national retail vendor of Apple Macintosh systems. Those of you who are stuck without a nearby CompUSA now must resort to internet and catalog resellers, unless you're lucky enough to have a regional reseller like Fry's or Microcenter nearby. (If things go really well with Artemis this spring, though, we at AtAT figure it's not entirely unlikely for at least one of those dropped retailers to come crawling back with promises to play nice.)

Just goes to show you, you really can't see JFK too many times, and you should never miss an episode of the X-Files. ;-)

And yet, being the sole national retail seller of Macs doesn't seem to have had any effect on CompUSA's advertising biases. As faithful viewer Arthur Wagner points out, the CompUSA color insert in today's Sunday newspapers (at least here in Boston, and in the paper wherever Artie lives) is the equivalent of the CompUSA of old. Think back to the time not so long ago when CompUSA was where a single lonely Mac (generally the most overpriced and underpowered model) would sit in a dark corner, mouseless, displaying either a System Error, an At Ease interface, or pure unpowered blackness on its screen. Well, there may be a wider Mac selection down at the store these days, but in the ads it's the same old story.

In this entire sixteen-page color ad insert, the only Apple presence takes up just under a quarter of page three. And that whole space is taken up by a single bundle, consisting of a 6500/250, a 15" AV monitor, and an Epson inkjet printer, all for the low, low price of $2399.93. Now, granted, it's a full four cents cheaper than the Compaq system next to it-- but do we really want to invite comparisons between the 6500's lowly 603e processor and the 333 MHz Pentium II in the Compaq? (The Compaq system lacks a monitor and the color inkjet, but this isn't the way to show that Macs can compete with Wintels in price/performance...)

Ironically, the top of the Mac ad screams, "Mac is Back!" Well, that's nice, CompUSA; now how about proving it by putting a G3 system in there next to the Pentium II's?

And speaking of Compaq, the Wintel juggernaut just keeps on jugging. It's been a mighty busy couple of weeks for the manufacturing giant; first they bought out Digital for almost $10 billion, the highest-priced tech buyout in history, in order to gain Digital's inroads into corporate sales. Then they unseated IBM as the exclusive computer brand to be sold by Radio Shack, which means at least from now on we'll see something other than those omnipresent Aptiva's whenever we stop in for batteries or a cable.

Now, most folks would agree that those are pretty serious accomplishments. But in a hat trick of business coups, Compaq's done it again: they've just replaced Apple as the official computer of Canon Sales, a large Japanese retail chain. Just as Radio Shacks will now only sell Compaq's, so will Canon stores. Why did Canon make the switch? According to Webintosh, it's partly because Apple's sales have been falling-- from 60% to under 50% of Canon's sales.

So if you happened to be looking for traits that Apple and IBM have in common, here's one: they both just got their corporate butts kicked by Compaq. Ouch.