Surprise! Reportedly, Sears isn't doing very well with its re-entry into the whole Apple reseller thing. When we read that at Think Secret, you could have knocked us over with a feather. We know, we know-- we've been hard on Sears in the past here at AtAT, given the sorry state of affairs at our local store, but given the marked improvement we witnessed during our last visit, we really thought things were 100% fixed and ready to rock. We'll explain in a minute.

First, the crisis: Think Secret's anonymous source claims that Sears decided to hop back on the Mac Reseller bandwagon because the chain "has been losing money left and right" in its computer departments. The iMac was a smash hit, and the iBook was virtually guaranteed to top the charts as well-- so what better way to prop up a sagging bottom line than by selling those hot commodities at price levels higher than any other reseller on the planet, including the Apple Store? Except, of course, there's one little problem: the average consumer seems strangely reluctant to pay a premium for the privilege of buying a computer from a store who couldn't keep a display model running if the fate of the world depended on it. And the higher price tag also appears unjustified when the salespeople in the average Sears computer department are most helpful when they're completely absent, which is unfortunately only about 80% of the time. As a result, sales of Apple's products haven't been the saving grace Sears had hoped for, and now the chain is considering scrapping computer sales completely.

Now, longtime AtAT viewers are fully aware that our particular Sears store is (we hope) even worse than most. When last we checked in, the iMac was represented by a lone Bondi Blue model buried way at the end of the aisle, invisible to passersby. This poor forsaken iMac was always either 1) sitting idle in the Finder with no demo software to run, 2) crashed, or 3) completely off. After the iBook had shipped, the iBook's presence at this store consisted of a (usually empty) pamphlet dispenser sitting next to a Compaq laptop, under a huge sign telling everyone to buy Pentium processors. No wonder Sears is having trouble selling computers.

Today, though, we revisited the store expecting the worst, only to find that things have improved completely. The Bondi Blue iMac that was completely obscured from view has been replaced by a Blueberry iMac DV that's completely obscured from view. It was displaying the Finder, so we launched iMovie just to put something interesting on the screen, on the off-chance that someone looking for a down comforter would get lost and wander by. The iBook pamphlet dispenser is now hidden behind three laptops: the Compaq, another anonymous Wintel notebook, and a huge hulking black thing that looked like a laptop for Godzilla. Upon closer inspection, however, the Monster Notebook turned out to be a wood-and-lucite display case, and buried inside was a real, honest-to-goodness iBook. Of course, you could barely see that it was an iBook, since everything but the LCD panel and the keyboard area was covered with black-painted wood, but hey, why would anyone want to see what an iBook looks like? Obviously no one would buy an iBook because it's a marvel of industrial design, right? Anyway, the iBook was off, couldn't be powered on, and the J key was missing from its keyboard-- but it was there, in all of its can't-see-it, can't-try-it-out, what-the-hell-is-this-big-black-thing glory. And with an improvement as great as that, how is it that Sears still can't seem to sell enough computers? It's a mystery for the ages.