Santa Monica, CA, February 23, 2009 – As of 2009, Apogee Electronics will no longer develop products for the Microsoft Windows platform. Apogee has made this decision in order to focus all research, development, and support resources on the Apple platform with its unparalleled power and stability. Apple offers a wide range of affordable, powerful desktop and laptop solutions ideally suited for music creation and audio production.
A couple of years ago, Wil Shipley wrote about why he develops for the Mac and how it allowed him to score a big fat Lotus sports car.
Frankly, I see this happening more and more in the near future as people change their needs and there are realisations that beyond the FUD, there’s not much difference between Vista and Mac OS X in terms of casual surfer utility and once you break this hold on people, it changes them forever.
I’d like to think that ten years of running NIMUG and five years of running Mac-Sys would mean something in the current tsunami of people coming to the Mac platform in Northern Ireland but in truth we’d have to point at the Apple Store in Belfast as having a huge effect on general acceptance. Actually having a store on the high street was something that I’d considered (but frankly the margins available to me as an Apple Reseller did not permit that – and that’s fine. The Apple Store excels at bringing people to the platform and giving them the basic training skills and Mac-Sys excels at fixing their computers (according to Apple, MacSys has a 93.3% approval rating which put’s comfortably in the top 10% of Euro Apple Service Providers.)
Having a complementary relationship with Apple was always something we strived for. We didn’t have cash flow to sell Apple hardware but there was always room for us to help customers find the best and cheapest place to buy. And we spend hours on the phone every month fighting for value for Mac owners in terms of dealing with insurance companies, Apple Customer Service and other repair companies (who don’t specialise in Mac repair). We’re responsive to the market which is why Mac-Sys now has a “Free on Friday” health check, waiving diagnosis fees for hardware we receive on Fridays, the Enterprise Park is open late on Tuesdays and so is Mac-Sys and lastly, the guys have dropped the charges for picking up hardware – we have guys out in the field already doing installations in homes and offices and it’s going to be a minor detour to have your Mac picked up and dropped off after repair.
Like Apogee, we’ve responded to the market as a result of making the decision to specialise on the Mac platform six years ago as no-one else was doing it in Northern Ireland.
Find your niche, own your niche and when folk in your market tell lies about you, try to resist the temptation to punch them in the mouth 🙂