Apple in Guitar Center?

This is great news. Much easier to target musicians if they are sold in a shop they normally go in anyway. Hopefully it'll work out well.

a few of the guitar centers ive been to already had some apple stuff, but not computers so this is great. pro audio users need to just give up on their windows machines. anyone thats ever used a mac for pro audio knows that they are painless compared to sonar/cubase/whatever on a pc. did you happen to watch the G5 keynote on logic? haha

I was in guitar center a few weeks ago and was impressed by how many Mac's and Apple displays they had running their studio there. I think I counted like five Mac's. This will be great.

That is where I have bought all of my macs including My Dual G5. I prolly would never had bought a Computer had the Music store I buy all my guitar stuff at not sold them.

Although this is a good thing, remember that music creation is a very small and specialised market. Apple would only increase their market share by about 1% if they got all musicians to use Macs. I just hope Apple does not concentrate too many resources on music and neglect its core market, DTP and graphics.

All the musicians I know use PCs, but would prefer to use Macs if the price was lower, especially since Macs have a lot less noise than PCs. I am actually the only sound engineer I know that does use a Mac.

This is *huge*. I have my own home studio, and I first bought a Mac so I could run Digital Performer. During the slump I worked at a music store and dreamed about getting a Mac in there, but my store was content with selling mediocre products with slightly higer margins, quality and customer satisfaction be damned.

Guitar Center is universally hated among all other music stores, but they lead the way. This is a great move. I hope they have lots of MOTU products hooked up to the Macs.

I don't think anything Guitar Center does indicates Apple losing focus in other markets. And whatever the music market size, Apple does need to keep--and grow--core creative markets: not just for the direct sales to musicians, but for the mindshare gained among the many non-musicians who will then know what pros use! (I also suspect that 1% figure is far too low. There are probably MORE musicians than Mac users. Getting them "all" would be a big boost.)

Garage Band?

Apple just registered a TM for Garage Band. I wonder if this is related.

When I think garage bands I think guitars and the kind of musicians that hand out at these stores.

hmm. Maybe Apple agrees with 'nagromme.' I do. Niches can + lots of $$$ if you get lots of them.

hmm.... guess not. (no press release)

arn

I currently work for a Sam Ash music store in the Chicago area. We have a couple of Macs running DP/Logic/ProTools and we sell them as well.

I just saw a brand new G5 in our warehouse tagged for a customer two days ago. We are definitely Mac dealers as well. I think most units are sold preconfig'd for your pro audio platform of choice.