Macs have been on sale in Apple stores for years now. They also show up in reseller stores from time to time. What they haven’t done, until recently, is show up in conventional box stores.

That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when I went in to kill some time at my local Best Buy in Asheville, NC to find a mini-Apple-store within a store. The store featured only four laptops, including the MacBook Air and a pair of Apple iMacs.

The little display area may be nothing compared to an Apple store, but what caught my attention was not only how many people paid attention to the mini-store, but how they paid attention to it. In the usual areas, you see two kinds of people.

First, there are the clueless. They may have owned several PCs, but they really don’t know PCs. To them, they’re still magic boxes, but they’re not excited about this magic. They want the most bang for the buck, but since GHz and MHz no longer means much of anything and they sort of know that Vista isn’t really much good, it’s hard for them to get a grip on what’s what with PCs, much less get excited about buying one.

The other group are the PC enthusiasts, but perhaps ‘enthusiast’ is the wrong word. They know computers. They like computers. But, they’re not excited about the computers of 2008 the way they once were.

Except, that is, when they look at the Macs. There, both kinds of people were gathered around the PCs like kids around a Christmas tree awaiting the word to start opening the presents. Everyone wanted to look at the new toys. Including, I was amused to see, several Best Buy sales people who were also milling about trying to get a better look.

Apple has arrived to the great American middle class. In the past, Macs were for creative people, for urbanites who could get to an Apple Store, and for those willing to go the extra mile to get a Mac. In short, even though Macs were also known as easy to use, they were not meant for everybody. In a Best Buy in the Blue Ridge mountains, I saw Macs that, high price tags and all, were getting everyone’s attention.

The mass market Macs have arrived, and everyone wants one.