Touching the back wall of the Apple store

I remember the first time I tried to buy something at an Apple store. Usually avoid 'em cause I don't like Apple as a company, but I do like their laptops. I'd decided an M3 air was gonna be perfect as a general use laptop.

Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.

Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...

Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".

It isn't copied by other consumer electronics companies because none of them have the brand value of Apple. Microsoft tried the model with its own chain of stores but failed pretty quickly. Most tech is better suited for Best Buy-like megastores where shoppers can browse and try a bunch of products and brands in one go. And for phones (at least in America) most people still prefer to go to their carrier store.

Go outside of tech though and the Apple Store experience is commonplace. Apple itself copied the concept directly from high end fashion houses.

Porsche has the same philosophy, from what I've heard and experienced

It was (is?) a really good way of letting you know you could hang around and play with the machines - at the time Computer City and similar places (which is what Apple was really trying to compensate for, many of them had few or no Macs at all) would heavily imply you should "buy or leave" if you stayed too long.

i wonder if it's true anymore.

Recently i've bought the new iphone, it's not as expensive as the high end macbook, but still, not a small amount of money.

I got to the store, asked for the phone, finalized my purchase and got out, all in 15 min i guess. No second guess, no cold feet, because i had been researching smartphones for years before going with it, i knew what i would get and what i wouldn't.

Back in the day you would indeed need to go to the store to know what you were getting.

Macs are the only reasonable Apple product at the moment, except for the ridiculously priced accessories (headphones, mostly). Some of them are even upgradeable through tinkering, which is 2 things literally opposite of what Apple seems to want their customers to be thinking about.

They definitely do this in bars. I've had friends that got recruited thru modelling agencies. It's not a huge stretch to think of them doing it in other types of retail too.

Apple products are expensive. Assuming most people inside an Apple store can afford them, they will be wealthier than the average, which means they will be better dressed, groomed, and will generally take better care of themselves than the average.

Maybe they have employees rotate through an undercover role, but more likely the store just attracts cool people.

Nice, a conspiracy theory I can get behind.

I wonder: what roles are they being hired for? How does Apple ensure they never talk about their work?

I hate to say it but apple store employees have a strange aura of... fertility?

Okay now we need more details here, please!

Maybe I'm not American enough, but that experience sounds much more like luxury to me than having an employee bugging you to buy without you explicitly asking.

The Apple TV at its most expensive is $150. I remember walking into high end stores like Burberry in my early twenties, seriously contemplating the cheapest items there and also being ignored except by security.

I wonder if they’d have acted any differently if you had actually waved cash around.

The business model of the S1 is just wild. It mimics the PC clone industry of the 1990s.

From the Wikipedia page:

This product is what is referred to as a 'common mold' which means many different suppliers can produce this same model. The manufacturers are almost exclusively located in China.

Primarily defined by the use of a system-on-a-chip of one of the Actions brands and some common core features, S1 products vary widely in software and hardware as well as design.

I counted 62 different manufacturers listed in the Wikipedia article that apparently licensed this reference design (the core features and basic hardware), and who then made variations to the user interface or added a feature or two, and slapped their names onto it.

There seems to have been a whole industry of MP3 Players that were essentially identical at the core electronics level in the early 2000s, and we never realized it.

Oh, good memories. Everyone had one of these at school! I think I had a 64 MB version. It was peak commodity tech at the time.

I remember getting a Creative Zen a few years later, and it was the first time when I realized how everything turns into crap with the technology advancement. No batteries, so needed USB charger to travel (USB chargers weren't even too popular back then). No mass storage support, only sync through Windows-only software, MTP was unusable on Linux, didn't work with cars or boomboxes. Video playback required converting to very specific formats, which the provided software often failed to do, needed custom codec packs. Absolutely required MP3 ID tags to even show the song in the playlist. Cool idea for a player, but the software was pure garbage. I think I broke it once and used the old player for years more.

Oh my these devices were everywhere.

I started with a 32 MB Diamond Rio PMP300, so cramped as I transcoded music to 64kbps just to cram an hour in there, but the ability to listen to music without it _ever_ skipping (I was MTBing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter) was invaluable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

And then upgraded to a 64MB Rio 600

https://tweakers.net/ext/i/964783073.jpg

After that it was straight up to a 4GB black iPod Nano gen 1 that I rocked for a loooooong time as it was insanely hardened and durable.

Archos did some of the very earliest HDD-containing players back in the day, and beat the ipod to market by about a year (December 2000 launch).

My first mp3 player was a 20GB archos xs202, which I loved. Partly for being a great music player, partly for being a generic 20GB external drive when needed. I think at one point I had it set up both as a music player and to boot debian on a host PC when connected via USB...

I largely agree with you, but I think one of Apple’s secret sauces (and they aren’t the only one) is that while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.

The iPhone or your equivalent Android device truly is one of the most useful inventions humanity has ever created, especially for the era that we currently exist in.

Kind of a counterpoint?: they weren't luxury, but they were higher-end. Newer tech, more metal... I didn't have an ipod in this timeframe (got a 2nd gen iPod touch in 2009), so instead had a half dozen cheap, plasticky, LCD, low-storage MP3 players.

Regardless of your argument and I do mostly agree with it, I do think that most things referred to “Luxury Goods” are, in fact, the ”high-margin doodads” you are referring to. At least colloquially, things like Chanel perfume and Luis Vuitton are exactly what you describe, and by most people’s definition, “luxury goods”. (I did not downvote, but notice you have been. I suspect it’s mostly the Apple Army aha)

I don't buy this argument at all.

Apple stuff has always been expensive, yes, but it's not "luxury". You get what you pay for. Apple products are the best in their category, despite the surprisingly organized hate machine that has existed forever.

> SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls.

If you're against the idea of selling things that are cheap to make at high prices by relying on branding, you might not want to call Cartier or Rolex products "genuinely valuable". Jewelry is not fundamentally expensive.

Getting rid of the physical Genius Bar and physical specific checkout locations was the worst decision they ever made. Now people are just kind of randomly clumped around and there's no clear delineation between staff who are already busy and staff who can immediately take questions.

Over the past few years, even if the store is empty, you are more likely to be left alone.

It's sometimes difficult to find someone to let you buy something, even.

I think it varies a lot by location - the store I live by now is a regional store but still offers walk-in for everything except Genius Bar appointments.

If you're buying a phone or Mac or watch or Vision, they seem happy to help you on the spot or tell you where to hang out until someone's avaiailable.

I did see someone carried out of an Apple Store by four security guards (one on each limb). He had been ranting in the store about open source. I guess he probably posts here.

My first MP3 player was the Creative MuVo. The storage part (actually, really everything but the battery holder) you could disconnect and use as a USB stick, which was also how you loaded music onto it. I (correctly) thought this was very cool.

I eventually did get an iPod, the one that was all capacitive touch buttons and wheel, the last one before the click wheel.

Looks like the 5th gen Ipod was the thing in 2005/2006, per wikipedia. Sounds like I graduated HS +/- a year or two of the author.

In that time frame... I was using sub-GB MP3 players, with MMC cards or maybe SD cards by that point. (I didn't have those massive multi-thousand song collections, so it was fine...)

Because I have pics saved in my personal folder, mine in high school/early college were:

- Classic 64MB w/ 128 MB memory card

- MPIO FL100, probably 2 or 3x bigger; I wore this on a belt holder

- Sandisk Sansa, the bulbous one, before later using some of the smaller ones. Probably still only 256 or 512 MB of built-in storage.

It can’t be the Nomad. “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame”

I have never seen a nomad and I know that line. The nomad was famous for it as far as I am concerned.