I remember in the early 90s going to most of the computer shops in the local area and having fully usable display models.
It was rare to see a display computer that didn't have MS Paint running with the previous person's doodle sitting at pride of place in the middle of a 320x240 screen (which felt like about a billion pixels back then).
In fact I remember going to one of these stores when I was about 8 and asking the salesman about which games were available on the PC, at which point he promptly dropped the system out of Win 3.1 and into DOS , loaded up "The Secret of Monkey Island" and left me to play for about an hour while my parents went off and did some other shopping.
That was probably the point at which I decided I wanted my next system to be a PC rather than a Sega Genesis.
I suppose Apple is in a similar position, most people are roughly familiar with Windows and are mainly shopping around for specs/price. You could waste a lot of time playing with a system and asking the salesmans advice only to go off and buy the thing on amazon.
With Apple devices they don't care where or when you buy it since they take money either way but since most people are not going to be familiar with OS X there is a definitely an advantage to selling "the experience".
It's the same with cameras, iPods, and everything else at a lot of retailers. They often aren't even charged. Why even have a real one on display then?
I had a somewhat similar experience with the Apple Store though. I wanted the 15" MacBook Pro with the matte, high-res screen, but my local Apple store doesn't stock those except for the highest end model. So they "lost" a sale, but they don't care because I'm still ordering it from the same company. That's the power of owning the whole channel.
10 PRINT "I AM AN ELITE PRE-TEEN GEEK IN THE EIGHTIES!"
20 GOTO 10
It was rare to see a display computer that didn't have MS Paint running with the previous person's doodle sitting at pride of place in the middle of a 320x240 screen (which felt like about a billion pixels back then).
In fact I remember going to one of these stores when I was about 8 and asking the salesman about which games were available on the PC, at which point he promptly dropped the system out of Win 3.1 and into DOS , loaded up "The Secret of Monkey Island" and left me to play for about an hour while my parents went off and did some other shopping.
That was probably the point at which I decided I wanted my next system to be a PC rather than a Sega Genesis.
I suppose Apple is in a similar position, most people are roughly familiar with Windows and are mainly shopping around for specs/price. You could waste a lot of time playing with a system and asking the salesmans advice only to go off and buy the thing on amazon.
With Apple devices they don't care where or when you buy it since they take money either way but since most people are not going to be familiar with OS X there is a definitely an advantage to selling "the experience".