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Waiting for the Man (2/23/98)
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MacReview has reprised their investigative journey down to the local CompUSA to check on the progress of the Apple store-within-a-store therein. On Mark Starlin's first visit, he found a lot of style but no substance; while everything looked great, there wasn't a soul to be seen. Unfortunately, on his return, it seems that not much had improved.
Just as he had found on his last visit, and just as countless AtAT viewers have told us, you can stand in the Apple section looking clueless for twenty minutes and not a single CompUSA employee will approach you. Obviously this isn't the case in all CompUSA stores, but it's a frighteningly common occurrence as far as we can tell. In addition to the lack of trained Apple-savvy staff, Mark also found display Macs that were off or not running any reasonable demo software. And perhaps most disturbing was his inability to find much Mac software in the Mac section; he had to go into the PC software area to find a Mac copy of F/A-18 Korea. There's certainly some room for improvement here.
Our own petition, which aims to persuade CompUSA to start advertising Apple systems more heavily (or, in fact, at all) is now in its last day, and we'll send it off tomorrow. We are hoping, as many people are telling us, that the continuing problems with CompUSA's Apple support, such as no advertising and no sales presence in the Apple section, are simply due to the relatively short time elapsed between the team-up announcement last November and the completion of the Apple stores. To be sure, CompUSA's accomplished a lot in a very short time, and for that they should be commended-- but we hope we won't be waiting long for the last of these remaining problems to be corrected.
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SceneLink (479)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/23/98 episode: February 23, 1998: Armchair analysts fire up the abaci as they consult the gods for news on Apple's Q2 financial results. Meanwhile, aliens that communicate via strange, hieroglyphic-style symbols appear to have abducted the PowerPage staff, and a trip to the local CompUSA for a new Mac may doom you to a lifetime of loneliness and no sales help...
Other scenes from that episode: 477: Don Those Thinking Caps (2/23/98) Well heck, we at AtAT are still recovering from the cardiac arrhythmia induced by last month's surprise announcement of an Apple Q1 profit, yet everyone else seems to have recovered pretty fully. Some people are so recovered, in fact, that they're already thinking about the next quarterly results... 478: Aliens Ate My Wall Street (2/23/98) Okay, someone please confirm that we aren't seeing things. When we visited O'Grady's PowerPage earlier today for the latest info in the world of Apple laptops, the day's entry consisted of nothing but a sleek, stylish black-and-white graphic of a Powerbook and a question mark, not linked to any URL and bearing no descriptive text...
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