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Time For A Spending Spree (4/27/00)
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Whoa, check it out-- faithful viewer Jason Collier notes that e-tailer king Amazon.com has just opened a Macintosh Store. It's not like we as a community are hurting for online sites from which to buy our Mac stuff, but one more isn't going to hurt. Plus, since it's Amazon, you can use Amazon-specific features; throw a Thrustmaster Dual Analog Gamepad onto your Wish List, or go impulse-shopping in the Games section and buy a slew of titles with 1-Click shopping. The selection isn't super-great yet (just take a gander at their collection of hard drives), and the prices aren't blowing our socks off either, but for the convenience of being able to throw a copy of Unreal Tournament into the cart with our preorder of The X-Files Season One on DVD, a Keely Smith CD, and the latest Buffy paperback, heck, we'll take it.
The big-picture benefit of this, of course, is that it shows people that a mega-huge retailer like Amazon considers the a Macintosh community big enough to be a source of income. That's a good thing-- really. Anything that increases the visibility of Mac products is a-okay in our book. Of course, the question in our minds is, does the advent of this Mac Store have anything to do with Amazon's recent hiring of ex-Apple Europe head honcho Diego Piacentini? After all, Amazon just hired him away a couple of months ago, and now this pops up. Coincidenza?
One big hitch: you can't actually buy Macs themselves from Amazon-- yet. To do that, you still have to go to the Apple Store or one of the larger catalog resellers, or be an existing customer at one of the smaller resellers like Small Dog. Still, an Amazon Mac store is a huge step forward, and frankly, we wouldn't be terribly surprised if Amazon soon became an authorized Apple reseller. Er, on second thought, maybe not-- we doubt Apple would want to give its own Apple Store that kind of competition...
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SceneLink (2258)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/27/00 episode: April 27, 2000: Prepare for a sudden deluge of amateur video productions-- iMovie is now free. Meanwhile, Amazon.com gets friendly with Mac folks, and Microsoft wants to stick Windows inside your next Cuisinart...
Other scenes from that episode: 2257: The Best Things In Life (4/27/00) You know how a lot of times, rumors mostly come true, but the reality doesn't quite match up to the hype? Like when Apple finally took the wraps off the long-awaited Pismo PowerBook, it turned out to be pretty much last year's model with AirPort and FireWire thrown in... 2259: Embed THIS, Buddy (4/27/00) Some things we read these days just force us to let out a long, ragged sigh. Take, for example, this ZDNet article about Microsoft's push into the so-called "embedded systems" world. The idea here is that just about every kind of electrical appliance in existence could benefit from an integrated, on-board computer-- not necessarily with disk drives and a keyboard and all the standard personal-computer-type accoutrements, but some kind of solid-state processor and memory with enough logic to improve the user experience...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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