Dear Friends,

We got some fresh snow for President’s week here in ski country, which makes our ski areas happy and the roads crowded with slow-moving traffic. There are a lot of things I can do without in winter, but the one that really gets me is how driving on my dirt road makes snow, mud and ice accumulate on my wheels and throw it out of balance. The shaking on the highway usually gets me to go to the car wash, which sometimes works, and sometimes just makes it worse. I always thought the north country should have some special type of wheel washing system that dips each wheel into cleansing warm water.

We are under construction for our new store in Rutland, Vermont, which will be open this spring. It is a smaller store and while it is in Vermont’s second-largest city, some Apple Specialists asked me when I was in California why we would open a store in a city of 20,000. Well, distances can be confusing in a rural state like Vermont and we expect to serve a much larger area. There are a couple of other considerations as well — we have a partnership with Green Mountain Power and we want to prove to ourselves that a small store model will work so that we can replicate that in other communities, too. What makes the GMP partnership great is that they are currently building an Energy Innovation Center and are working to mark Rutland as the “Solar City” of New England.

We just got in some of the new 128GB iPads, so if you are looking for the ultimate iPad, come on over to any one of our stores. In fact, we have just about all of the iPad and iPad mini models in stock, including some refurbished and discontinued models, too.