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Not every Apple fan had to line up in the wee hours of the morning and deal with crushing crowds yesterday to buy the latest iPad tablet.
Mikey Weiss had plenty in his Williamsburg store.
Weiss, standing inside his near empty Mikey’s HookUp store yesterday afternoon, as Apple enthusiasts braved the elements in long lines outside Apple stores, could have sold an iPad or other Apple gadget and had the tech fan on his or her way in minutes.
It’s one of the Big Apple’s big Apple secrets.
“I could have had dancing girls dressed as iPads in the streets,” he said. “But I enjoy selling to local customers rather than people coming in from Manhattan to snag them up.”
Not that the hungry Apple hordes won’t be coming, he said. Once they’ve depleted supplies in Manhattan, Weiss thinks they’ll be knocking on his door.
Weiss is a certified Apple seller, a member of the loosely knit affiliation of merchants authorized by the Cupertino, Calif., company to deal in iGadgets.
For Weiss and other such businesspeople, product launches are low-key affairs.
Apple prefers to reserve the hype for the primary retail chain locations that it runs and services.
Not that Weiss complains. He said he shuns the retail frenzy and doesn’t advertise the fact that he’s the only independently owned store in Brooklyn selling the new iPad.
Most customers don’t even know they’re in stock, and the only promotional material is a small placard next to the two demo devices he has set up in the store.
At the end of the day, Mikey’s HookUp sold five iPads.
Most certified Apple sellers like Weiss keep marketing to a minimum for a number of reasons, including Apple’s tight hold on how they can promote its products, a number of merchants told The Post.
Doing business on the outer reaches of Apple’s retail network can be difficult, some merchants said. A number of certified Apple specialists spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be on Apple’s bad side.
Product-launch days for Apple are also good news in other, off-the-beaten-track areas of the Apple universe — like re-sellers who retail used, vintage Apple gadgets.
Kevin Anderson, CEO of Powermax, which sells older Apple goodies in Washington state and Oregon, said as the iPad 3.0 hit store shelves yesterday his phone was ringing.
“We are getting a lot of inquiries on reselling the iPad 2,” he said.
Anderson said 40 percent of his tech retail business is made up of sales of used gadgets.
With the launch of the latest iPad, he expected a surge in customers looking for discounted older models, a product he is uniquely qualified to deal in as a certified Apple specialist and re-seller.
The world of Apple sales is unlike that of any other retail sector, as products retain value even years later.
Anderson, like other re-sellers, pays more for out-of-date Apple items than for other brands.
For example, Anderson’s shops sell old iPod Touches for up to $200 and used MacBooks at $499 — which he buys from folks at about $275 in store credit.
Original 16-gig iPads, which he buys for $175, still command a price of about $299.
No brand retains as much of its value as Apple does, these re-sellers said.