Byte into Apple at The Orchard
Jeff Moses
Former MCC students Justin Cannon and Travis Mahaffey aren’t looking to become the next Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
In fact, until October of 2010, they were just trying to make a buck from selling junk.
Fall 2010 was when the two former Thunderbirds decided to open their used Apple product and repair shop called The Orchard.
The two high school friends both moved from Show Low, Ariz., to the Valley of the Sun where they attended Mesa Community College and began working as waiters at Fogo De Chao.
They used the money from that to buy used cars cheap at auction and flip them for profit, an enterprise that Cannon described as “a terrible business to be in.” At an auction, the partners discovered “surplus electronics, really old stuff from the cities and whatnot.”
“We got in to what they call the junk trading business,” Cannon said.
During their endeavors as junk traders, Cannon and Mahaffey came across “some really old Apple laptops iBook G3s like 400 ‘megahertz’ ancient.”
“We made more money selling those than anything else, and long story short, eventually we found some wholesalers, and now we have wholesalers all across the country and we aren’t selling anything old and crappy like that,” Cannon said.
Used MacBooks are the biggest seller at The Orchard, and business is thriving, evident by the opening of their second location in Chandler.
But money is not the only motivation for the young entrepreneurs at The Orchard.
“We have a huge college following,” Cannon said. “College kids; everyone wants a Mac uses a Mac, but when you’re a college student, you’re eating ramen and you’re doing everything you can to make it by, and you just don’t have the money for the full new computer, so we’d like to make it an available thing. A large portion of our customer base is students.”
The Orchard offers a 25-percent discount for MCC students on all service and accessories and $50 off on all the computers in the shop.
The store is located at 244 N. Country Club Dr. in Mesa, and the second location is 1919 W. Chandler Blvd. in Chandler.
The hours for both stores are Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sundays from 10 a.m. until 3p.m.
