The Lisbon Apple Center

Yesterday, as RuiRui already pointed out, I stopped by the new Apple Center, in Lisbon.

It’s a small shop, with some hardware on display, but it’s no Apple Store for sure.

They had some people there buying a iMac G5 (the older model). I almost went up and said to the couple “Hey, don’t buy that! There is a new model already!”, but I suppose that availability of the new one is not that good, and in Portugal, it’s even worse.

The new Powerbooks where also absent, but that’s expected, I suppose. Maybe in a month or so.

The iPod part of the store was pretty lame: a single iPod (and not even a color one??) was attached to a Bose set of speakers, nothing else.

Some hardware gear, non-apple, on the shelfs, mostly external hard disks and wireless routers (Belkin and not Airport stuff??).

All-in-all, a as-good-as-you-can-expect-from-Portugal-distribution-channel-store. The service seemed nice.

The low point of the store is the usage of a 20” cinema display hooked up to a Windows machine running some Point-of-Sale software. I’m all for using what works, but in a Apple “store”, it’s just plain wrong.

To me, it seems that we have a demand for Apple gear (which is good) but the offer is still lacking (which is not so good).

Meanwhile, I’m booking my flight to London, to attend the London Perl Workshop, and check out the new powerbooks at the London Apple Store. I doubt I’ll get to see them before that in Portugal.