ASHEVILLE — Apple computer lovers soon will have another repair and sales operation to serve their needs.
A Michigan company, CityMac, plans to open an Apple sales and service store at 755 Biltmore Ave. by mid to late November.
The store will follow an “Apple specialist” concept, which Apple defines as “independent Apple Dealers and Service Providers with a strong commitment to the Mac platform” that “have met or exceeded Apple’s highest sales and service authorization levels.”
CityMac will focus exclusively on Apple products and service, competing directly with a company that’s pretty much had that market to itself, Charlotte Street Computers. The original location of CityMac is Traverse City, Mich., but owner Jim Neu began looking for a second location in April 2008 and was floored by a visit to Asheville.
Of course, the overall market share for Macs isn’t exactly great—it’s been hovering in the 8-to-9 point range for the last year—and having two Mac shops in town will certainly increase the competition for that business. Can Asheville sustain two of these places?
I think Charlotte Street Computers will be fine, as they are not limited to Macs only. I’d be more worried about the MacCity guy, who will be competing for their little slice of the Mac pie.
Still, I would venture to guess that in Asheville, there are a disproportionate number of Mac users compared to the national level. The artsy fartsy crowd tends to gravitate towards Macs because of the old “Macs are better at graphics” adage, which is no longer relevant, and we have a large population of those people. Plus, they make you seem more artsy fartsy just to own one.
Commodore 64, baby. All you gotta do is hook up that 300 baud modem, and you’re up and running. Super-hack to 512KB RAM, with a 20MHz CPU accelerator and a dot-matrix printer for ASCII pr0n. Oh ... YEAH!
I’ll stoke the fire a little: Mac shops don’t have to do as much business because they can charge a lot more to fix things.
People think Macs are more expensive than PC’s, but really, if you price out a PC with the exact same hardware specs/performance, they usually end up pretty close. The part I hear people complain about it upgrading or repairing a Mac. The total cost of ownership on a Mac is definitely higher than that of a PC.
