By Graham K. Rogers

As today is a Buddhist holiday in Thailand and tomorrow (Friday) the start of the Buddhist Lent, it gives me a rest from work and the shopping malls are a little less frantic.

Late morning I wandered over to the Central Pinklao mall which is on the west side of the Chao Phraya river: Thonburi. I have made my home here for the last 20 years or more and have a better feel for this part of Bangkok than more tourist or commercial areas. Not that there is no commerce. This side of the river is a thriving part of Bangkok where several million people reside.

With the large numbers, I realised at the time I was writing the eXtensions columns for the Bangkok Post on Apple- and Mac-related subjects (2003 - 2010) that there was room for an Apple retail outlet over here, but each time I made the suggestion, it was gently shot down. Apple and Bangkok have changed.

Today, around lunchtime, I went up the escalator to the 3rd floor and when I looked towards the iStudio -- the Apple retail outlets here -- it was shuttered. A couple of weeks back, I had seen the hoardings on a shop which had previously been one of the many hairdressing salons in the mall. There was a notice then that it would soon be a new iStudio.

When I saw the old store was closed, I looked to my right and saw that the new store was now open with its nice new front. There were a number of people inside. The mall gets busier later. There are still indications that a number of touches need finishing, but it is fully operational and has a fair level of stock.

This was actually the first time I had been able to get my hands on a MacBook Pro with the Retina display and I am trying hard to pretend the difference doesn't matter. The display machines are running OS X 10.7.4, Lion, but this is not unusual for retail stores here. Last year, it was a fair time before the in-shop computers had their updates to Lion installed. There was no internet connection and the wifi showed no signal. I tried the shop's own link in the list of networks shown, but the password was not recognised. Perhaps this was a new machine as all the others were online and the kids with the iPads were having great fun. With the 250 GB solid state hard disk and 8 GB RAM, this MacBook Pro was really snappy. Of course I want one.

While there were several accessories available -- both Apple and 3rd-party -- only a few had prices clearly displayed. I could see there was no prices on the racks either. All the Macs and iPads were clearly priced, with the iMacs off to one side on a bench looking really effective.

The first retail outlet in Pinklao was a small booth -- called iBeat -- which focussed mainly on the growing market for iPods (then) and some MacBook computers. The location beside an escalator and opposite a footbridge entrance, was perfect and a lot of interest was generated. Com 7 who ran this, and a number of other iStudio outlets, invested in a relatively small iStudio in Pinklao that was long and thin on one of the internal aisles round the mall area.

While location is part of the equation, timing is another and they opened this not long after the iPhone began to generate increased interest in Apple products. After the iPhone 4 and then then the iPad it was often packed out from one end to the other.

As a confirmation of this change in the market, Copperwired, who run a number of iStudio outlets in the Siam and Thonglor areas of the city, also arrived with an open-plan store within the PowerBuy area in the basement: hoping to catch those already looking for computers.

With the new larger Com 7 store, as well as a number of other outlets on the Thonburi side of Bangkok, it would seem to suggest that markets for Apple products are continuing to grow.

All that is now needed is for Cupertino to recognise this and push the Thai operation up the list so that its uses do not have to wait until almost last for updates to arrive.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.