Whilst the old “Where in the world” adverts seem to have finally gone the sillyness that is PC World hasn’t really changed one bit.
I reluctantly had to drop by there to purchase a switch and for obvious reasons couldn’t help be nosey at our competitor’s Apple offerings….

Firstly which of these two iSight cameras worth £99 would you steal if you were a theif… The alarmed one or the two alarm-free ones beside it? Why not leave the alarmed ones out, and hide the others behind glass as they seem to do with everything else (including laptop screens, which makes it impossible to evaluate the characteristics of the display!)

Next up, the iMac. There are two iMacs currently available and admittedly due to the impending move JustMac doesnt have either on display, however at least we provide honest and accurate information on them. PC World currently has a 17″ Intel Core Duo iMac (at the standard Apple price) and a 20″ iMac G5 (at the old Apple price) - presumably they have some sort of stockpile of these that they have to shift, but still, it’s now an EOL (End of Life) Discontinued Product. They could at least offer them at clearance price or mention that there IS a new iMac!!

They don’t have a MacBook Pro (which we do, but I think we’re the only people that have one on demo locally at the moment!) or even make any mention of it’s existance and the iBooks on demo have the obligatory missing keys (although remarkably the remotes haven’t been stolen from the side of the iMacs!)

Throught their store they have the old rainbow colour Apple logo everywhere, with text relating to Apple products including on their little information sheets (which all look as if they’ve been printed on some really old printer with a dodgy paper feed) set in the old Garamond typeface.

Not to mention the staff know nothing about Macs, and the OS on the Macs themselves are regularly defaced by bored kids renaming the Hard Drive, deleting Applications etc. Why oh why don’t they lock them down in the same way as their Windows machines, or at least use a NON-ADMINISTRATOR user account for demonstration.

No wonder people who buy from PC World don’t consider the Mac platform properly, I think it’s about that either the staff at PC World or those within Apple that are responsible for keeping an eye on them, think different.