Merrill: Best Buy may sell Mac Mini at select stores

[MacBytes]

Category: News and Press Releases
Link: Merrill: Best Buy may sell Mac Mini at select stores (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20050129005245)
Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by Mudbug

[nagromme]

Actually, it's ALL Best Buy stores--now confirmed:

http://macminute.com/2005/01/28/best-buy/

Both Mini models, available online now and in physical stores "soon."

Along with the 512 Shuffle, but not the 1 GB.

[macnulty]

I'm getting a feeling of deja vu all over again.

[uv23]

I thought BB always sold Apple stuff?

[neoelectronaut]

What the hell took so long? Nothing more aggrivating then having ONE retailer around here carry Macs or Mac-related products (CompUSA). If Best Buy would have sold Macs all along perhaps they would sell better. Walking through Best Buy is painful because you see nothing but PCs everywhere. *Cringe*

[KREX725]

What the hell took so long? Nothing more aggrivating then having ONE retailer around here carry Macs or Mac-related products (CompUSA). If Best Buy would have sold Macs all along perhaps they would sell better. Walking through Best Buy is painful because you see nothing but PCs everywhere. *Cringe*

Personally, I don't like BB carrying Apple products. When I worked there in the late 90's, the Apple sections were horribly maintained and the computer sales staff only put an effort into talking people out of Macs. Unless Apple intends to supply a rep for each store, it's not worth the effort. What is this, the fourth time Apple has given BB a chance. It never works out. Does any Best Buy carry Mac software nowadays? None of my local ones do.

On the other hand, I say Apple should keep flooding the malls with Apple Stores and mini locations. I'd even love to see some kiosks or something similar to that.

[neoelectronaut]

Personally, I don't like BB carrying Apple products. When I worked there in the late 90's, the Apple sections were horribly maintained and the computer sales staff only put an effort into talking people out of Macs. Unless Apple intends to supply a rep for each store, it's not worth the effort. What is this, the fourth time Apple has given BB a chance. It never works out. Does any Best Buy carry Mac software nowadays? None of my local ones do.

On the other hand, I say Apple should keep flooding the malls with Apple Stores and mini locations. I'd even love to see some kiosks or something similar to that.

Yeah well, right now it's either Best Buy or nothing.

We have no Apple stores in the area, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

[nagromme]

BB has sold Macs online, and they have experimented with selling Macs in stores but it hasn't worked out--apparently because of ignorant staff steering people away from the Macs. They have sold iPods anyway though--but I notice they're not on display, they're in a locked glass cabinet below knee level, still in their boxes, with no signs! You have to crawl on the floor to even get the price.

Either BB policies have a bias against Apple products, or more likely, their policies allow local people to have that kind of bias. Plus there's the unintended bias of ignorance--if the staff doesn't KNOW about Apple products, they can't answer questions intelligently.

Either way, in my experience, anything Apple that BB carries, they do NOT want you to know about or buy. I can see Apple approaching this cautiously. The Mini will be an interesting case. Apple recently tried Macs in some BB stores AGAIN, as an experiment, and apparently it failed again. Yet the Mini is coming to BB anyway. Maybe it will work, since the Mini can be treated almost like a PC peripheral! A complete system upgrade, software/security/etc., in a little box you set on top of your PC!

(People made the same complaints about CompUSA years ago, but in that case I disagree: my CompUSA is great Apple store with knowledgeable staff and all the latest goodies running to play with.)

[jettredmont]

Did BB pull all Macs from the pilot program store shelves? Last time I looked (before Christmas, so not really really recent), my local Best Buy had an aisle of Macs. They've done some reorganizing since then (I've been in there since, just not looking in the computer section), so maybe they dropped Apple then?

And, no, Best Buy does/did not sell Mac software, except for a very limited selection of 5-10 "hot" titles (seems like it was something like The Sims, Photoshop, and OS X, for the most part) which they stocked next to the Apple hardware, not next to the rest of the software (lest a foolish Windows user get all the way home before realizing that OS X won't run on their Dell).