Dana Stibolt was in his early 20s when he started seriously tinkering with Apple computers at his parents' computer shop in Severna Park. It was the late 1980s and the computer that he taught himself to fix was called the Macintosh Plus.
Stibolt developed an expertise in fixing the computers and he was willing to take his knowledge to the homes and offices of desperate customers. He turned his car into a moving inventory of spare computer parts, becoming, in effect, a computer doctor who made house calls. His company, MacMedics, was born.
"I was driving around Annapolis, Severna Park, Baltimore, D.C. at times," Stibolt, 41, said in a recent interview. "I had a Toyota Tercel station wagon that was completely packed with service parts and hard drives ... anything I could possibly need because I didn't have an office. It's the model of the mobile repairman, but nobody had ever done it with Macintosh computers."
Stibolt's fortunes in the Apple computer repair business have ebbed and flowed with the computing powerhouse's failures and successes over the past two decades, but his company has been largely a tale of steady growth. His business is among about a half-dozen small, independent local companies that have survived and still cater to Mac owners in the Baltimore area, according to Apple's Web site.
Over the years, Stibolt has watched Apple introduce several lines of computers, reinstall co-founder Steve Jobs as a company leader, launch the successful iPod and iPhone, and open more than 200 retail stores - potential competitors to his repair business - across the country.
In 1997, Apple posted a $1 billion loss on sales of $7 billion. Last year, the company reported a $4.8 billion profit on sales of $32.5 billion. Apple's rival, Microsoft Corp., made $60 billion in revenue last year, with $17 billion in profit, according to its annual report.
In addition to selling direct online through its own and a handful of other Web sites, Apple has thousands of authorized resellers - from big-box stores to small, privately run shops - and an unspecified number of authorized service providers who can repair its products.
In the past, Apple has had a tense relationship with its resellers, of whom Stibolt is one. Many store operators feared Apple's retail stores launched in 2001 would force the small authorized resellers out of business.
The company did not return a call seeking comment.
