It’s easy to forget how many strides Apple made since the Year 2000 to become a force in computing. This article from TechRadar.com sums up the magic, from the iPod to embracing Unix as the new Mac OS X to those stores jammed with customers for advice, repair and business counseling.

Here in Austin on Dec. 26, the busiest day of the retail year, the Apple store in The Domain retail village (shown at left) was buzzing with customers. I visited a handful of shops in this retail mecca and Apple’s was busiest. So busy, in fact, that the crowds were overwhelming the network that could connect them to schedules of free workshops and training. Of course, that mob at the end of the store might have been bringing in holiday gifts for the Geniuses to repair, or just getting on-the-spot training on a new tool. Or just asking why they couldn’t discover when the store’s network was going to be back up. In a legendary episode from the series Californication, our hero Hank writes his first paid blog entry from an Apple store and posts it.

The Apple Stores have their shortcomings — the red-shirted floor staff is wildly uneven in its expertise about the Mac line — but these places are a hub of face to face advice and counsel. One such overlooked resource is the One to One training, a year of lessons available for $99 that entitles you to a one-on-one session of an hour per week. It’s a great way to go deeper on an Apple solution, especially something like Numbers, Pages, or iPhoto, the software that Apple makes and nobody else seems to know how to teach.

One to One has its own limits, too, such as scheduling: the Apple Concierge Web site won’t let you book more than one session in advance. But even if you only used 10 visits out of 52 weeks, this would be a $9.90 consult. You can even bring your own laptop to train, and so take away more than just learning. You can finish a production.