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>> We are opening 25 Apple-owned retail stores across the U.S. this calendar year, in 2001. 25. And the first two stores will open this Saturday, here at Tyson's Corner in McLean Virginia and at Glendale Mall in Glendale California across the other side of the country. Why these two? Because they were the first two that were ready. There's nothing magic about it. We're very excited about this. These are two great places to be opening and we'll be opening this Saturday. Why? Why are we doing this? It's clearly a lot of work. There must be a reason behind it. And the reason behind it, the primary one is very simple: Growth. What do you mean? Apple has about a 5% market share today if you count our education sales, our consumer sales, our pro sales. You might say, well that's not a lot. Well turns out it's not too bad. It's actually larger than both BMWs and Mercedes Benz's share of the automotive market today. Matter of fact, it's actually larger than both of them put together. BMW has about a 1.8% global market share and Mercedes has about 2.1%. Of course that's excluding Chyrsler. So it's not too bad. But the challenging new is the following. Based on our market research, most of the other 95% don't even consider us before they run out and buy a Wintel PC. We want to capture some of that other 95%. For growth. There's a second reason why we're doing it, and that's the digital hub. We believe that the PC is evolving into the center of our digital lifestyle. So that rather than just being stand-alone computers now. In the case of the iBook, for example, these computers are being used as the center for a variety of portable digital devices, as we saw in the advertisement. And so it's not just the hardware any more. It's the hardware. It's the operating system. It's applications and it's portable digital devices, all combining to create solutions. MacIntosh customers are early adopters for portable digital devices, as we can see. Way ahead of the PC market in general. And that's why we believe that there's tremendous opportunity here to educate the rest of the market. These devices are very important. We're actually going to carry and sell them in our stores. And so we are going to sell six digital cameras, six digital camcorders, six MP3 players, and six handheld organizers. And we are going to use our capability to edit the vast selection of products to the six best in each category, for a total of 24 portable digital devices that we'll sell in our store. The first thing I want you to notice is our 25 stores represent less than 1% additional locations. Less than 1% of the locations we sell through today. Our strategy is not to put our resellers out of business. Our strategy is to work side by side with our resellers and we think our stores will actually help some of our resellers a lot. So we're planning on working side by side with our resellers in a joint strategy with stores and our current resellers.
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