Apple in Best Buy Pilot Over?

I just checked the Best Buy website and they are still selling them there. Of course, maybe they are just clearing out the inventory. Hopefully they arent ending the Best Buy relationship - I wanted it to expand to the Best Buy in my area.

I just checked the Best Buy website and they are still selling them there. Of course, maybe they are just clearing out the inventory. Hopefully they arent ending the Best Buy relationship - I wanted it to expand to the Best Buy in my area.

Terminating the pilot program only means all BB stores will carry Apple products or none of them will. I bet they will all start carrying Apple products...since all the iPods sold out here.

Maybe the Best Buy online music store is finally finally going to happen. And they don't want the competition?

The problem with BestBuy is they do nothing to promote the Apple products they carry. My local store has iPods but the are only displayed in a locked case which sits on the floor that NOBODY CAN SEE. They do not even have one out of the box to be seen, yet all the other devices are at eye level. No wonder BestBuy can't sell Apple product, it's because they don't put any effort forth.

My Best Buy in Greenville SC has (or had) displays sitting in the back for iBooks and iMacs and never put them out. They only have iPods (usually 1 or 2 or sold out) in a locked glass case.

I think the effort was half hatched and Apple chose not to follow up on it.

The last post I read had an interesting point about the music store though. Although I would suppose that it would be a partnership and Best Buy would NOT stop selling iPods, it's one of their best store sales boosters. 3 iPods a week at my local store helps them get kudos and rewards for best store in the region.

In the DC area the only promotion of Apple was mentioning in their flyers that certain promotions were not valid or were valid on Apple computers. And in the stores that carried them, they were put off in a corner. So it would be no surprise to me that Best Buy would drop them.

Well, the local bestbuy here, is awlful with the Apple products. All the Macs are passworded, so you have to go find someone who knows the password so you can give it a good test run, but once that is done you come to a desktop that has been trashed by people :-/ Icons gone from the dock, programs in the trash, and set to an odd non-native resolution. Its like no one bothers to take care of them and its just such a hassle to get someone to enter the damn 'password' (which leads to an admin account, thus the point of the password is pretty stupid)

All the boxes are in the wrong places, FCP will be where AppleWorks should be, MS Office is where 'The Sims' are suppose to be (one can tell this by looking on the shelf to see the price tags..). There is hardly any mac software there, either. The place is a mess whenever I go there.

I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't selling anything... Of course when one looks at the nearby PC laptop section-- it is fine. BestBuy staff seem to ignore the Apple section, unless they 'have to'.

IMO, its sad if BestBuy stops selling Macs, since it is one less place one can go to, but Apple really needs to train the bestbuy staff and/or bestbuy needs to get their act together, at least in my local store... I believe if they kill the program, all together, then there should be some good sales on whatever is left in stock.

I talk to about 30 of the BestBuy's regularly that sell the Macs and there has been no mention of pulling the pilot, only talk of expanding it.

']IMO, its sad if BestBuy stops selling Macs, since it is one less place one can go to, but Apple really needs to train the bestbuy staff and/or bestbuy needs to get their act together, at least in my local store...

I believe the original stories for this program indicated that Apple was providing training to Best Buy staff in the pilot stores. Regardless, I'm not sure it would help. My experience is that the staff doesn't know much about the PCs either (and I don't think this is specific to Best Buy but I'm in there looking about often enough to have Best Buy first in my mind). I enjoy lingering while the staff helps out other customers in the computer section.

In one instance, a man asked what the refresh rate on the monitor was. The sales guy responded that the computer they were looking at should provide more than 30 fps on most current 3D programs and there wouldn't be a noticeable difference in the quality of the picture above that. In my experience responses like this aren't at all unusual.

As a previous employee of Best Buy back in the days of their original relationship with Apple, I kinda expected to see this (although not yet confirmed). BB's computer sales employees are routinely anti-Mac without ever using them (what's new?). That area was always neglected unless I "patrolled" it (I was in the "media" dept.). If I wasn't working, inquiring customers were told to come back when I was working if they had questions because the HO (home office) employees wouldn't even attempt to help them.

Right before I left the company, they brought in the original 233 iMac and although it sold okay (they rarely had but a few in stock), it quickly faded away too.

Unless Apple intends to hire its own people to staff the Mac section open-to-close, they're wasting their time (IMO).

Personally, I like this "new" idea floating around about opening kiosks, etc. in universities or shopping malls (if not a real Apple Store). The Apple Store here in St. Louis is always busy and seems to get good reviews by non-Mac users who ventured in out of curiosity.