Office Depot to sell Apple hardware

[billbuckhead]

Office Depot to sell Apple hardware

By Nick dePlume, Publisher and Editor in Chief

July 12, 2004 - Office Depot, one of the nation's largest sellers of office products, has become an Apple Authorized Reseller, the chain recently announced on its Web site.


"We are proud to be an Authorized Reseller of Apple Products!" a page at the Office Depot site proclaims. "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."

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<http://www.thinksecret.com/news/officedepot.html>

Slowly but surely Apple is building a fine dealer network.

[MikeG]

1. It's like buying a Sony Betamax, isn't it?

[emulatorloo]

2. No, Mike, it isn't like buying a Sony Betamax EOM

[billbuckhead]

4. Apples going into their 3rd decade& is one of only two computer makers who

make money on actual computer sales. Surfing the web is much easier on a Mac,even against the latest Xp service pack with Advant on top of it all. BTW. many think Microsoft Office works better on a Mac. In fact the new Mac Tiger internal search technology will find it's way into future Microsoft office products.

[Catch22Dem]

20. Actually, he's right

Beta is far superior to VHS. VHS benefitted from superior marketing. That's all. Until the advent of digital (and still today) Beta is what you'll find in any studio, like a news studio.

So, he's correct, it's like buying a Betamax. A superior product which suffers from an undeserved stigma.

[Dukkha]

28. what made VHS so popular?

Porn.

In the 80's before Blockbuster Christian right monopoly came along, XXX Porn VHS tapes were the #1 most rented videos. Beta, while superior in quality, never caught on and ultimately died in the consumer market and lived in the the pro video market.

Similar thing with DAT audio. It was never accepted in the consumer world but became the standard mastering format in Pro Audio Studios.

Apple Computer is the same way. Far from the most popular with the average home user but by far the most widely used among Desktop Publishing, pre press & Pro Audio & Video. Notice in movies and TV you always see Macs being used.

[Catch22Dem]

29. Exactly n/t

[htuttle]

3. It's more like buying a BMW

[emulatorloo]

5. Or a VW, or a Cadillac, or any other brand that prides itself on user

experience.

[billbuckhead]

8. If the Soviet Union survived, they would have had a better OS than Windows

At least better than Windows 2000 and surely a better browser than Explorer

[asthmaticeog]

7. Kind of,

if by that you mean that it's a vastly superior product that's inexplicably less popular than its competition, then yes, it's exactly like that.

[MikeG]

9. Which is what I meant.

[billbuckhead]

17. It's like German cars vs domestic ones

There sure is room at the bottom for a people's computer. Maybe EU or Asia will give us some bargain priced innovatively designed entry level computer. Probably wouldn't be a good thing for America but the Windows user experience and productivity sucks.

[AlCzervik]

16. My husband works for apple

and he needs his job, don't hate on apple.

[emulatorloo]

24. President Gore is on the Board of Directors of Apple

and he needs his job too.

[AlCzervik]

25. yes he does and as egomanical and nuts as Steve Jobs is

he give lots of money to our side.

[MikeG]

26. Hey, I bought one of the first Macs , OK.

You know, it would smile when you put the floppy in, and frown when you took it out.

[Dukkha]

30. I STILL have one

THE original 1984 Mac. Model #00001 with a 400kb floppy drive, 128kb RAM, system 1.0, Macwrite & Mac Paint. It still works perfectly. :D

[frylock]

6. i'm sure they'll be very affordable

[Deja Q]

12. Price-per-megabyte?

If I can build a PC for under $700 that has:

1GB RAM DDR SDRAM
200GB hard drive
Nvidia GeForce 5950FX video
SB Audigy audio
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ CPU with Nforce motherboard

(or a higher end name brand that's ~$1200-$1500)

I'd expect a Mac of the same price to pull a similar punch with the RAM, hard drive, video, and sound options. Only the higher-end Macs get this high, and for $3k, 512MB RAM and a puny ATi Radeon 9800 Pro is sad. IMHO. If one wants SMP power, they'd probably want the extra RAM and video power, why is Apple mooching off their customers?

[emulatorloo]

22. Apples and Oranges, so to speak . . .

Compare Apple high end with Brand Name high end and you will see they are competitively priced. Apple ain't gonna be a white box build it yourself kind of company.

Please note that you can buy ram, hds, ATI vid cards, sound cards, from third party vendors as well. . .I buy crap for my mac and my pc at newegg.com all the time.

Ram is Ram and ATA is ATA. The only trick is with which DVD-r drives are supported by the OS, but that is no big deal and if you wanna know I will point you in the right direction.

You will pay more for a mac ATI vid card than the equiv PC card, but that's ATI's call, not Apple's and ATI has to recoup their development costs somehow.

M-Audio's sound cards are great on either platform, and cost the same.

[emulatorloo]

14. Office Depot doesn't sell dirt cheap systems, Apple will be competitive

with any other system they sell.

Then there is iLife. . . .

Your time is money too. . .how much finangling will you need to do w a budget xp box to get it to do everything an entry level eMac will do out of the box with the bundled iLife?


http://www.apple.com/ilife/

[frylock]

18. if you took the money you were going to spend on a top-shelf mac..

you could build a comparable XP box with 3 times the amount of RAM, and still have enough left over for Sound Forge and Adobe Premier.

[emulatorloo]

19. Compare Top Shelf Mac and Top Shelf Dell, Sony, etc

And you will find that the pricing is quite competitive.

Apple is never gonna be a white box, assemble your own company. . .


(PS you can buy xtra ram and hds from third party vendors for macs too)

[frylock]

21. that's why i'll continue to home build my windows/nix boxes

[emulatorloo]

23. If it works for you, cool!

I home built my last two pc's too and would never do it any other way.

I home built a mac out of spare parts but that is another story.

however, for me, the whole mac experience is head and shoulders above the windows xp experience. . .so it is worth a few more dollars up front.

[Deja Q]

10. Cool! (I love true choice in the marketplace!)

I may not often like Macs, but I value the concept of choice.

I still miss my Amiga... :sniff:

But I wonder how much OfficeMax had to pay to get the official seal of approval... :eyes:

[lanparty]

15. I wronged Amiga ...

When I was a big Apple fan, I was also an ignorant teen. I bad-mouthed Amiga. Now I realize that Amiga was WAY ahead of everybody else.

[lanparty]

11. I'm surprised ...

Are they doing a "store within a store" deal like CompUSA. I know that Apple got pretty serious a while ago about making sure Apple products were presented properly. They like to make sure that there aren't any punk PC gaming Windoze teens bad-mouthing their products on the sale floors where they're presented.

I was once a devoted Mac fan. When it was Mac vs Win 3.1, the choice was obvious. But Microsoft got really aggressive about updating their operating system with protected memory space and pre-emptive multi-tasking. Once I stepped into an office and started using Windows computers, the developer tools from MS also put Apple's offerings to shame.

Now that Apple is using a Unix core, I hope to get back into Apple at some point in time. Hopefully, Apple will support a native .net implementation that will finally deliver on Java's empty promise of cross-platform software.

[Deja Q]

13. .net = Microsoft... insecure, buggy, Windows-centric...

Any features for the Mac would be castrated, naturally, and don't expect Unix/Linux support. :-( Microsoft lacks the integrity.

[lanparty]

27. Less buggy than Java ...

.. And supported on Linux via the Mono project.