As the Apple Turns: Scene 4812: Aisle 3, By The Elmer's Glue (7/12/04)

Aisle 3, By The Elmer's Glue (7/12/04)

Now, here's something we never thought we'd see: the newest national Apple Authorized Reseller is none other than... Office Depot. No, seriously, follow the link! We swear it's real! As the announcement says, "you can take advantage of one stop shopping for all your office supply needs and now all of your Apple technology needs in one convenient online location. It's that easy to shop and save at Office Depot!"

People, c'mon, stop giggling. We're serious.

Okay, fine, so it's a little strange thinking of Macs being sold at an office supply superstore, but really, isn't it a good thing? Note that the announcement says "online location," so it's not like they're going to be turning the floor-model G5s on their sides and stacking this week's half-price staplers on top of them or anything-- yet. Think Secret notes that an informant who leaked the Office Depot announcement before it went public also notes that Mac products "would indeed be available at the stores in the coming days," so apparently we will get to see shiny PowerBooks being sold alongside boxes of rubber bands and rolls of bubble wrap.

We're not knocking the Office Depot thing, mind you; we love the idea of Apple getting some more retail exposure, though we can't help but think that Apple has tried the third-party retail thing so many times before (Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City-- all multiple times, we believe, and none of them currently) that there's a reason why it eventually opened its own stores: no one else on the planet seems to know how to sell a Mac. Well, other than CompUSA, but even they need stores-within-stores and typically get help from Apple-badged sales reps.

iPods are another matter; toss 'em anywhere, they sell themselves. But Macs can't just be thrown in a corner and set fire to if anyone wants them to sell, and we're having a tough time imagining that Office Depot sales staff are going to prove much more competent than the reps at Best Buy et al. We're just concerned that we'll walk into an Office Depot in three months and flash back to the days when Sears used to use demo Performas as step-stools for the height-challenged personnel.

We'll just have to wait and see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, though, we have to admit that it is pretty cool seeing the sheer breadth of stuff that Office Depot is selling online. They aren't just pushing iMacs, folks-- they've got every Mac in the lineup, all the way up to the 3.5 TB Xserve RAID-- just $10,994.00 and in stock now! We'll take three... plus a hand soap dispenser, some artgum erasers, and an electric 3-hole punch.

SceneLink (4812)

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The above scene was taken from the 7/12/04 episode:

July 12, 2004: The iTunes Music Store finally hits 100 million downloads, much to the joy of some guy in Kansas. Meanwhile, Office Depot becomes a nationwide Apple Authorized Reseller, and John Dvorak wonders if Microsoft is preparing to shut itself down...

Other scenes from that episode:

4811: Missed It By THAT Much (7/12/04) Given our "oh yeah, we also still have to do that whole AtAT thing" broadcast schedule, you've no doubt already heard by now, but as faithful viewer foolsdragon first notified us mere minutes after the goal was reached, Apple sold its 100 millionth song in the wee hours of Monday morning...
4813: No Fair-- He's Peeking! (7/12/04) Normally we'd sit on something like this all week and trot it out for Friday's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, but since not much of urgency is happening in the Mac world (and the fact that we can say that on the eve of Macworld Expo is so sad we think we just might cry) and this piggybacks right off of last week's installment, we just can't wait...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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