About time.

I was told by one of the people that works at Capitol Mac down off Main Street near Virginia Commonwealth University that Apple was planning on putting a full service repair shop at the store in Short Pump as well. My guess is that this partially due to every middle and high school kid in Henrico County having an iBook. (Which is h*** on us teachers but thats beside the point.)

This is all great news as far as I'm concerned, but I'm wondering how it will affect our two local Mac stores, Capitol Mac and Mac Pro? Will they slide back to just service/business customers?

Our two local stores can disappear for all I care. Both stores lost all the employees that gave their customers any value. Which, lets face it, is knowledge. Their prices, selection and stock can be beat just about anywhere else.

The Apple guy that CompUSA has in their store here in town has been the only useful resource to this town since MacPro started to loose all it's best resources.

An Apple store is very welcome, at least I have never felt dirty when I walked of one.

My biggest gripe with those two stores is their lack of inventory. If they're going to concentrate solely on service, fine. But if you're going to advertise yourself as having a sales dept., then you might want to consider having something in stock to sell.

I called both stores asking about new iPods over several weeks - and neither had any in. I've been told for every single product I've asked about that they could "order it for me". Well, no s***, I can order it myself too, what's the point? You have to stock something to sell something. Using the same example, I walked into Best Buy and CompUSA and found both stores stocked full of new iPods in all three versions. So MacPro/Capitol Mac lost a sale and I bought it at Best Buy instead. Hey, I tried.

I've visited the Apple Store in Northern VA several times and it's very impressive... can't wait to see it down here.