Yes, indeed, the lines are as blurred as they never were. I am talking of the line where computing devices start morphing into personal electronics and lifestyle accessories, the line where things with chips are not an object d’ attraction but an object d’ desire, the line where the next customer is not your archetypal geek who digs into slashdot and hardocp or anandtech, the line where storage capacity is defined by the number of MP4 videos that you can store and not by the number of bits that it can take. Indeed, its a sign of the times that vendors and customers alike increasingly want to bury.

I just had a look at CNET’s photo-feature on Apple’s new retail store in NYC and frankly, was left wondering. Now, here’s a company that all these years made a product that was appealing only to a group of mac fanatics, so much that its customer group has been termed a cult more than once ! And today, it seems their sales/square foot is a multi-factor of other retail stores such as Target… Its funny and interesting for a variety of reasons. Hardly a decade back, if one wanted to buy a computer, you usually had to scout high and low for a vendor that was willing to accomodate even the barest of requests…Finding a 486DX2  was an art in itself, and finding a vendor who knows what he sells, an even bigger art ! And what have you today ! Well, not much has changed actually ;) Vendors still are as clueless as they always were..OEMs are clueless about what to package and what not to in a desktop/laptop…But one thing that has definitely changed is the customer….Companies increasingly do the right thing by empowering the customer in buying what they deem fit, and that speaks volumes of self-inflicted education that people have subjected themselves to, so they could be spared of the sales pitch that they encounter ;) And for all the other neophytes, rejoice, Apple’s opening up right round the corner ;)