The Edinburgh store is great, it's well staffed and looks good... but as the guy says they can't compete with the Apple store, the Glasgow one is pretty stunning.

The crunch for me is buying a new iMac for the other half, she gets a whopping student discount from Apple, so it's worth us travelling from Edinburgh (where there is a Scotsys) to Glasgow to get the machine from there.

Another anti-Apple piece from The Register. Ho-hum. Can't you hoodies find another tune to play on the top deck of the virtual bus you live in?

It's been perfectly clear for at least ten years that there is no place for pure branded PC resellers, especially Apple resellers. They have to have some unique specialisation to offer. If it's simply being in a large city, they're living on borrowed time.

It's Apple's product, and they can do what they like in the market having given resellers due notice. Apple's choice is to create a direct relationship with consumers, and it's working out very well.

"Another anti-Apple piece from The Register"

I'm a big booster of Apple products and even I can't see how this is "anti Apple".

Of course the Apple stores are going to drive the 3rd party sellers out over time> More and better products, newer machines, more direct access to warranty service, and of course in the US where the iPhone actually sells well, the third party sellers can't sell the iPhone.

All comes down to two words: Crap, Service.

More than happy to quickly take my money when I bought my mac, but both times its been in for repair, its taken forever. First time two months for a logic board replacement, second time 5 weeks for a hard disk replacement.

In both cases, promises of emails advising me of the progress never materialised, and in the second, I didnt even get a call to confirm it was fixed.

Scotsys can blame Apple all they want, but its their own fault.