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Apple Stores Demonstrate That Retail Still Lives
WheezyJoe writes "Maybe OS X Leopard has its problems, but the New York Times seems to think Apple has designed the ideal techie retail store. A policy that encourages lingering, with dozens of fully functioning computers, iPods and iPhones for visitors to try, even for hours on end (one patron wrote a manuscript entirely at the store) has 'given some stores, especially those in urban neighborhoods, the feel of a community center ... Meanwhile, the Sony flagship store on West 56th Street, a few blocks from Apple's Fifth Avenue store, has the hush of a mausoleum. And being inside the long and narrow blue-toned Nokia store on 57th Street feels a bit like being inside an aquarium. The high-end Samsung Experience showroom, its nuevo tech music on full blast one recent morning, was nearly empty.'"
I swear to god, it is a store that sells nothing. Its, instead, a showcase of the current samsung products available at any store that sells electronics in New York City. I went there once trying to buy a wireless adaptor for my sasmung DVD receiver, and I couldn't buy it there. Why would i waste my time going there?
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
In my experience Frys is bar none the best techie store I have ever been in. I have never been somewhere with as wide a selection. They carry apple products and a ton of other stuff too. I don't know how big the largest apple store is but you could probably drop it into the average frys.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I was talking to an employee at the Apple store near here, about the store.
The people working there weren't being particularly helpful, not their fault, there's not much you can do about a bad hard drive but replace it and I had a couple people ahead of me... and I was coming down with a cold, and feeling generally miserable, and really wanted to get my hard drive replaced and get home... but I was also wishing that I was feeling well enough to hang out there longer.
What was clear to me, but not apparently immediately clear to the young man, that the big difference between the people working at the Apple store and the people working at the other geek stores in the area is that they wanted to be working at the Apple store. The fact that they were working for Apple was what made all the difference to them, and that made all the difference to their customers. They wouldn't have been motivated selling Dells.
Now I'm not really a big fan of most of Apple's products... I really wish they'd unbundle so I didn't have to put up with a Mac so I could run OS X. But you can see the feedback going on, between the people who are into the whole Apple schtick, and the people who run the stores, and the style, and everything, and it all works together amazingly well. The reality distortion field lives in that feedback, too, and for an hour or so I was rather enjoying it.
At the time, people didn't realize that the iPod was going to be so successful, but clearly the retail store was an important step for Apple. This opinion piece illustrates one of the problems of business experts who opine about a single step in a strategy, without having the vision to see how it fits into the whole. So Apple's gamble seems to have paid off. Here's to Apple sticking to a plan and seeing it through.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Unlike most stores which has to lock their computers, due to the OS being so susceptible, most places that have Macs are open to explore, they probably are on a limited account but it's not the guided tour with safety-rails demos that you see on Windows PCs at most places.
Many I see are playing DVDs or maybe iTunes music. Once in a while Ive seen them with some FPS game. When I have seen Windows Desktops its either running 'just' the desktop, or one that has crashed to the desktop. Most of the times though I just see that fancy Aquarium screen saver.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Are you joking? There is so much software for OS X, Apple would need thousands of computers just to have enough hard drive space to fit them all. They don't install everything, just a few of the more popular software packages, like MS Office.
If Best Buy did that here in the states they would need to have, oh I don't know, 18,000 computers set up and running.No, they just need to install a few, common applications so they have something for users to try out.
No it isn't. A run-on sentence is a sentence in which two or more independent clauses are joined without punctuation or conjunctions.[1]
You might consider it a non sequitur... but then you'd also be wrong.
The funny thing is, if you ever have had that "Apple Authorized Reseller" experience, is that the Apple Store is a HUGE improvement over these mom & pop shops. I was skeptical when Apple started pushing these people out-- I support small business, and you always met interesting and fact-filled people in those stores-- but after purchasing several items (an iPod and a camera) in an Apple Store, I was sold. Sure, I could have spent less buying those things on the web. But the Apple Store people let me play with them, and if the question I asked involved opening latches and looking inside (like in the case of the tethered camera I was looking at), they were cool with me doing that. In retrospect, I remember dealing with a lot of snarky people at those "Apple Authorized Resellers", and they were always dingy and cramped. The Apple Store was a good move for Apple, and fortunately, it appears to have been a good move for its customers as well.
Office for Mac 2004 is fully drag and drop installable.
These people have never been to a Fry's. If you've never been to one, picture this: they sell porn and energy drinks within 20 feet of each other.
Obviously, you've never been to a Fry's, either. They have more than 50 feet of rechargeable batteries. The porn and the energy drinks, are, alas, some 170 yards apart in what appears to have once been an aircraft hangar for dirgibles.
I shop at Fry's, when I feel like walking an endurance walk-athon in order to get my $70 motherboard today rather than 3 days from now, at my doorstep. And if porn is what gets you to go, perhaps you might consider some alternatives?
PS: I've never used pornotube. I googled "youtube clone porn" and it came up. Truthfully, I don't care about porn - I'm happily married and nothing a porn video portrays compares to the real thing from a willing partner. But if that's your gig...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
For many years, I thought the Airport Extreme was a terrible value. (And I'm definitely pro-Mac.) For 802.11b and 802.11g, I always steered my Mac and PC friends to the more common and more affordable Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, etc. routers.
But the 802.11n version of the Airport Extreme seems to be getting consistently good reviews over other models, particularly in that many other 802.11n routers don't seem to have as useful or reliable a signal as the Apple router. Many of the other usually satisfactory brands seem to crap out on 802.11n in a way that the Apple does not. This is the first time I've considered buying the Apple router.
As someone who 'made the switch' a few months ago, I have to warn you about the worst part. I switched to a MacBook because I liked the hardware for the price and was originally planning on mostly running XP. Ended up liking OSX. And I can't tell ANYONE.
The second you say you like your Mac, people ask you if you are one of 'those people'. If you tell someone you are really happy with your new Toshiba laptop they think about it. If you say the same things about a Mac it must be because you are a fanatic.
As someone who got a mac for the hardware, it's unbelievably annoying.
# Sleek design
# Easy setup, great user interface
# USB port for shared printer or hard drive
# 5.0GHz 802.11n-only mode offers superior performance
# Gigabit Ethernet support
# Price-to-performance ratio
Guessing from your sig and he fact that you're asking on
The USB features (shared printers and USB disks) makes it more than worthwhile to spend the extra money to me. You can plug a USB hub into it and have disks hanging off it, all network accessible. Bit like a cheap NAS. Other than that, the way you set it up and configure it from a desktop app is quite nice.
That's been fixed already. I don't remember when, but I haven't seen it happen in a long time. (Yeah, it was really annoying.)
It wasn't fixed 4 months ago when I finally threw up my hands, said "enough of this shit" and vowed to switch. It's great that it was finally fixed, but come on! OS 9 handled unreliable networks better. Windows 95 handled unreliable networks better! That's the kind of bug there's just no excuse for... there's some very basic QA failure happening at Apple right now.
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