VAD, APR, AAR, Apple and other stories…

Historical text from HellasProject (2009–2014). It is not current advice or a present-day service.

After the (more than) rumours about the new APR, iStorm, which apparently will be somewhere in the centre (you can find information in Dimitris Karakatsanis’s article here), Apple users in Greece have started dealing with mainly commercial terms such as: VAD, APR, AAR, Apple Store etc. Let’s try to decode them briefly.

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VAD: Value-Added Distributor** in other words iSquare, the official distributor. Where Apple does not sit as a company it chooses some strong companies to distribute its products after securing some very specific requirements; this does not happen only in Greece, almost all of CEMEA works with VADs under mama Apple’s constant supervision.

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AAR: Apple Authorized Reseller**. Resellers also approved by Apple itself who trade its products and mainly work in after- and pre-sales support.

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APR: Apple Premium Reseller**. Resellers like the above, approved with some extra privileges, who are called to provide support higher than any other reseller (except of course Apple Stores if they exist). With a lot of cutting and sewing they could be called “small Apple Stores”…

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Retail** is of course all the other chains that can sell almost all Apple products but do not provide the services the resellers above provide.

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The situation in Greece so far**: The only APR is Document in Agios Dimitrios, while other companies that provide high-level support are Systemgraph, Elite in Thessaloniki, BestOffice, and a few more.

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The situation from here on**: It seems the Infoquest group’s first move will be dynamic with the opening of an APR; if Dimitris’s information in the article I cited at the start is correct (and it is) then we are talking first of all about a large investment, about services no store had offered until now, and apparently not about a “small Apple Store” but about the “Apple Store” of Athens (the first at least).

What should we expect? Apple is rising at steadily impressive rates even inside an economic crisis; people are turning to solutions that last rather than “deals” of the type “come on, take a Fujitsu Siemens for 500 euros and we’ll get the job done”; users enjoy better and better services and even the sceptics seem finally to support the efforts.

Source from “Lola nai ena Milo”, photos SomniusX