12 ms·

Touching the back wall of the Apple store

253 points by nivethan 1y ago

bigyabai 1y ago
> We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands. The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod. I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, 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. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.
- ericmay 1y ago
  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.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    Smartphone hardware is almost completely useless because of the software. At this point it's pretty obvious that the potential (but unrealizable) utility is just more of the luxury illusion they're selling.
    - zxexz 1y ago
      I’m genuinely curious what your view on the unrealized potential is! I would love something new to hack on.
      - msgodel 1y ago
        It's a social problem not a technical one.
        leakycap 1y ago
        I think it is the lack of a non-touch keyboard, not a social problem. I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.
        HaZeust 1y ago
        Great! The fun thing about social problems is that you, yourself, can make routines and picky-preferences in life to avoid most of them for yourself! You could start today by taking away HackerNews from your routine - as well as other platforms and sites that perpetuate behaviors that meet your criticisms. If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!
        msgodel 1y ago
        Yeah I actually don't own a smartphone at all. I don't know why you think I shouldn't talk about them after making that decision though.
        HaZeust 1y ago
        Well, with that in mind, have you noticed the problems you speak about going down in life? Was I right about the core of what a social problem is - and how it can be fixed? You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!
    - rekenaut 1y ago
      In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?
      - msgodel 1y ago
        The few among those things that even reliably function are covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them. The illusion is that you're getting a computer and not a collection of knickknacks and appliances.
        Gigachad 1y ago
        Almost none of those things have ads on the iPhone. All of them function reliably.
        worthless-trash 1y ago
        I mean, you're getting advertisements in your iWallet.. so...
        Gigachad 1y ago
        I'm not as that was US only but yes that was outrageous and hopefully never happens again.
        bacon_waffle 1y ago
        I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.
        tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
        > covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)
  - rekenaut 1y ago
    Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.
    - eigen 1y ago
      > the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase and you keep a phone 1-8 years but a car 3-20 years or 4x as long? seems like a bad ratio
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > 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. Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did. Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.
    - jwagenet 1y ago
      I don’t agree at all. Neither is Rolex high utility, nor is anyone fooled that an analog watch which sets you back 3-4 orders of magnitude more than digital/smart watches should be higher utility. Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        Rolex is not high utility, it is harsh environment. Real Antarctic expeditions, mountaineering, pre-GPS flight and navigation, SCUBA diving, sea navigation, desert navigation, etc. You could rely on your Rolex not to be the component that fails and gets you killed or lost. Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.
        hx8 1y ago
        Except mechanical watches fail all the time. The sapphire glass shatters, or a strong impact disrupts the movement, or a user doesn't screw down the crown and water enters the device. They require expensive regular services. Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.
- zxexz 1y ago
  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)
- gertlex 1y ago
  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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > 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.
  - agos 1y ago
    It had been a while since I worked in a business adjacent to jewelry, but at the time the notion was that for a brand like Cartier or Tiffany, the precious metal/stones account for 10% of the selling price.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      What was the business adjacent to jewelry?
      - agos 1y ago
        The company I worked for offered a platform for investments in (fully allocated) gold. They launched a spin-off[1] for 24k jewels, priced at spot gold price*jewel weight, plus a fixed and known margin in percentage. I worked on the e-commerce for it. [1] https://mene.com https://mene.com
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  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.
  - crooked-v 1y ago
    Well, usually. There have been some absolute low-quality fiascos like the whole butterfly keyboard thing. But one thing that really stuck with me was a few years back when I was making a spreadsheet of standard tech choices available for new employees for a startup, and almost all the Linux or Windows laptops out there that I could trust to last out of the box as long as a (non-butterfly-keyboard) Macbook had a baseline of 1080p screens, with upcharges just to get to 1440p. It might be better these days, but I felt like I was taking crazy pills just trying to find a certain baseline of quality for tech that would be getting used all the time every day.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      It feels almost like there’s this weird game that laptop manufacturers are playing to find something to skimp on with their models. Might be the screen, the screen’s antiglare coating, keyboard/chassis flex, input device quality, port placement, cooling capability, noise, maybe something else entirely, but it’s almost a rule that some aspect of the laptop must suck. Even the best reviewed models out there have some more-than-papercut flaws. Screens have gotten better thankfully, but now the thing is to use screen panels that are only practically usable at 1.5x/150% UI scaling for some reason. It’s better than being stuck with those horrid 1366x768 TN panels that used to plague laptops, but it’s still more annoying than panels that can do integer scaling well. Given the choice between 1.5x panel and its 1x decent resolution counterpart, I’d actually prefer the latter just because it’s less trouble.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Are you arguing that luxury is in the cost of production, rather than the quality of the product?
dusted 1y ago
> It's a shame I cannot remember what brand it was! I remember the iPod because it was a luxury good, but I think I owe that old Walmart MP3 player a lot more. Indeed. My first portable music player was a walkman, not a sony I think, but anyway, a portable cassette tape player.. I made my own mixtapes from other tapes, cd's and ozzy ossbournes "bark at the moon" vinyl. The next device was a portable CD player, I got a CD burner quite early on, damn, at that point in time, my harddrive was only maybe two hundred megabytes larger than a cd.. But it was good, I could do (sometimes less than perfect) cd-to-cd copies, and when I got MP3 files, I started being able to fit enough songs on the harddrive to make mix-cds.. The next device was my last portable music player, it was a "King" brand "mp4" player, which was a, still, tiny little 512 mib flash based device with some hardware buttons and an early oled color display.. I still have it, I don't use it too often, because I almost never need this type of device anymore, I listen to CDs in the card and at home I listen to CDs, vinyl and flac.. and at work it's a "hifi" headphone setup.
Suppafly 1y ago
>because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy I feel a lot of us have similar stories.
jordemort 1y ago
We used to play this same game at the Disney store, back in the 90’s
- leakycap 1y ago
  Mall Disney Store employees were micromanaged about the number of entry/exits vs. sales, which was measured by shift, so they definitely noticed!
secstate 1y ago
I wonder if it was the Creative Nomad [1] ... I had a Jukebox that had a 6GB spinning disk in it originally. Upgrading to a 20GB drive was the first real hackery thing I did with my old RedHat box. I had to buy an IDE converter too to move between the laptop connector to the desktop. That was also when I learned what happens if you dd a Creative Nomad Jukebox system image onto your root partition while the machine is running. The RedHat install stayed stable for about 20 minutes before weird things started failing and eventually the whole thing just locked up. Remember kids, always check you dd out file path! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad
- gertlex 1y ago
  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.
  - water-data-dude 1y ago
    I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better. - If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section. - If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been. - On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!
fnord77 1y ago
weird, nowadays I struggle to find someone to help me at my local apple store (SF Union sq)
- AzzyHN 1y ago
  I mean, yeah, an Apple store in the heart of downtown full of tourists is bound to be pretty busy
  - fnord77 1y ago
    It's pretty dead the times I go
analog31 1y ago
As recently as I've been in an apple store, the goods were out for people to touch.
paxys 1y ago
The experience has definitely changed, mainly because of how crowded most Apple stores get. While all the devices are still in the open there is no way employees can offer a personalized experience to every shopper and wanderer. You have to now make a reservation for that.
- leakycap 1y ago
  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.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  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.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  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.
JSR_FDED 1y ago
I remember the first time I went into an Apple Store. I was looking at a 17” PowerBook, salivating at the screen and performance but struggling with justifying the price tag. An incredibly nice lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. I told her I was thinking it over as it was a large purchase. She beamed and said “Of course, that’s totally understandable. In fact it takes on average 3 visits to an Apple Store before making a purchase”. It was the smartest, nicest, most low key way of saying don’t feel pressure…you’ll be coming back, and then you’ll buy the machine you’ve always wanted. Very on brand. And surprisingly still not really copied by others.
- emsign 1y ago
  That comes off as arrogant as a corporate face can be: Oh, don't worry darling. You will be back for more and we know each time your cravings will be stronger until you finally give in. See you and have a lovely day.
- piperswe 1y ago
  Porsche has the same philosophy, from what I've heard and experienced
  - leakycap 1y ago
    The Cayenne is one of the only SUVs I looked at where the sales experience made me more interested in the brand & left me with a good impression of the dealer. I hadn't seriously considered a Porsche until I learned they make niche parts for cars for decades - like interior bits and trim that most brands stop making/carrying after about 10 years. You can get parts for a 2002-2016 Cayenne at the dealer, but even though it shares a TON of components with the 2002-2016 Touareg you won't be able to get the parts from VW that you can still source from Porsche for those same years.
    - kalleboo 1y ago
      They even make retrofit CarPlay head units designed to fit in their classic cars both physically and design-wise https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/porsche-carplay-classic-head-units/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/porsche-carplay-classic-head-...
laidoffamazon 1y ago
The Apple Store used to be the embodiment of everything I didn't have when I was growing up - status, the lives the people in the sample pictures had, any sort of individual money or agency - now I have an Apple Store in walking distance and can buy whatever I want. It's a nice shift, even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have.
- Ashkee 1y ago
  It’s wild how things change, right? When I started using leadsapp, I realized small steps can add up to real progress. Having access so close makes a difference, even if the big picture feels far off.
- leakycap 1y ago
  > even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have (nobody does -- don't forget there are bounce lights and 20 people just out of frame...)
  - philwelch 1y ago
    Next you’re going to tell me Jony Ive didn’t spend every day in a featureless white room meditating on the ideal form of a laptop or phone or MP3 player (a rounded rectangle, it turns out)
    - leakycap 1y ago
      I think that's totally accurate, actually.
  - laidoffamazon 1y ago
    if TikTok is any indication it is the typical life of a Google engineer
ljsocal 1y ago
Having worked in said fruit stand for several years, I can assure you that you were neither undetected nor unplayed. We kept score, too!
- BubbleRings 1y ago
  Okay now we need more details here, please!
danpalmer 1y ago
A few years back I went in to buy an Apple TV. Walked in, straight up to the Apple TV display, stood using it for a few mins, stood looking outwards towards the rest of the store, tried to make eye contact with any staff. No one paid any attention, staff happily chatting away to each other. I couldn't have looked more ready to buy without waving cash around. Apple Store employees are definitely trained better than the average shop, but they are far from luxury.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  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.
  - hx8 1y ago
    Some luxury brands will play hard to get, others will fawn over customers. Different people want different experiences. How expensive the item in the catalog might change the level of service, but the brand will use a similar playbook across the entire catalog.
  - danpalmer 1y ago
    This may be their thinking, but if so I feel that would be down to bad training. In my experience the Apple TV skews hard towards those who have a lot of Apple products. It's priced far higher than the rest of that market. Most people buying an iPhone are buying a Fire stick or a cheap smart TV. I'd bet most people buying an Apple TV have an iPhone and a Mac. It would be like going into a Burberry store and shopping for replacement buttons for your $3000 coat.
    - oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
      I'd also imagine that Apple TV is a great entry point—especially given the relatively cheap price—into the ecosystem. It's like the modern equivalent of the iPod.
- 1y ago
throwaway_1237 1y ago
Steve Jobs would have loved this story.
sandspar 1y ago
+1 for the mention of Zune. I started with a Zune, a bright green and brown one, then went to iPods. Like the author and their first Walmart MP3 player, my first MP3 player, my Zune, left a much bigger impression on me than all of my later iPods. I think there's an alternate history where Zune, with all of its weird personalization and oddness, won out over iPod's sleek luxury. In some ways I think that that alternate reality might have been a bit more fun.
- leakycap 1y ago
  iPods got out of the way and could be used in your pocket I got a Zune and immediately realized MS had no idea why people liked the iPod Different folks like different things, but I don't think a big menu of lowercase text is more fun than the iPod in any of its variations
  - sandspar 1y ago
    That's reasonable. iPod was probably a better product overall, but I think Zune had more character. In Starcraft terms, I'd say that iPod was the pure Protoss and Zune was the primal Zerg. I guess I'd rather live on a Protoss world, but you can't deny that it'd be interesting to visit a Zerg one.
    - leakycap 1y ago
      Great analogy! I still use my iPod, because for whatever reason the OG battery hasn't died even though it is a FireWire model. It also, shockingly, sounds WAY better with any pair of decent headphones than any of my AirPods including the Max. Not a fair comparison since a wire will always have more bandwidth for fidelity, but the difference in listening experience on an old iPod vs a modern iPhone is so shocking I find that modern iPhone listening is like diet soda and is somewhat unfulfilling (I have Apple Lossless turned on, but the sound chip + low power of modern headphones + no wired connection... loses something) I don't mean in a "vinyl is better" sense... I mean, everyone I've demo'd this to has looked at me with big eyes when they put the iPod on and listen to the same song vs. the same headphones plugged into a modern phone. It's weird, especially since the iPods of this era can't do anything close to Lossless... they're 160-192k AACs so the limited RAM cache can play a full song without pausing on an old iPod.
leakycap 1y ago
Loved the honesty of this line > Part of my brain was saying "this place is bullshit and I use it to clown on the staff," and part of my brain was saying "I want the luxury good!! and I am going to purchase it now."
userbinator 1y ago
The MP3 player I had before that iPod was a much more generic one. I've spent the last few days occasionally checking Wikipedia and other places online to see if I can tell which one it was, and I have absolutely no idea. Might've been an S1, which arguably was better than Apple's products in many ways, and likely sold a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player
- computator 1y ago
  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.
  - bobsmooth 1y ago
    DankPods on youtube has a long running series documenting these low cost mp3 players, or as he calls them, nuggets.
  - longtimelistnr 1y ago
    i remember it very well, i bought a Sony at F.Y.E. at the mall. as a child, my mother insisted on Sony as it was reputable brand (thank god because they truly were better devices). But the non-Zune/Sony/iPod selections were all duplicates of the same garbage, this was ~2007.
- mystifyingpoi 1y ago
  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.
larusso 1y ago
I still run the theory that Apple has actors on staff to just “be cool at the Apple Store”. I once went into the local store during daytime in summer (my lunch break) to pick up an order. There was a very attractive young woman dancing next to the headphones seemingly testing out a pair of AirPod Max. And the rest of the store was also filled with strangely attractive persons. I wasn’t able to verify my theory because I have a work life and don’t happen to walk by an Apple Store during working hours. But in my mind I believe it would totally be Apple if they hire extra cool folk to make the store feel more hip and not empty.
- namanyayg 1y ago
  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?
  - jojobas 1y ago
    If someone did, would you believe him?
  - vidarh 1y ago
    A simple option would be to approach lower-tier influencers and offer them some free stuff to hang out, and get posts in return as well.
  - fortran77 1y ago
    I'm sure they hire people to line up in front of the stores, too.
- divbzero 1y ago
  Maybe they have employees rotate through an undercover role, but more likely the store just attracts cool people.
  - lupire 1y ago
    Attracts people who like to display expensive decorations, at least.
divbzero 1y ago
We had the same game in high school, except for a clothing retailer. The Apple Store didn’t exist yet.
jojobas 1y ago
Reads like a confession of a deprogrammed cult member, and probably is.
sour-taste 1y ago
Best mp3 player I ever had was the SanDisk sansa clip. Just loaded music off an ad card and weight almost nothing. Worked great.
- osculum 1y ago
  I still have mine with rockbox installed. I had to replace the battery, and the clip broke years ago, but I haven’t found anything like it to replace it.
  - cnity 1y ago
    I had this setup many years ago too. Then the clip zip, also with rockbox. Loved that thing.
- ragazzina 1y ago
  I wish even one thing I use everyday were as nice as a Sansa Clip+. Solid yet lightweight thick plastic with indestructible buttons.
satvikpendem 1y ago
> [The older non-iPod MP3 player] left a bigger impact on my life, really, than the iPod, because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy. This increased my computer proficiency dramatically (though not to the point where I became a habitual Linux user) and set off a chain of events that made me much more comfortable with amateur web development and eventually game development. This is such a funny end to this article that is reflected in my time too using Apple and non-Apple products. I had a similar generic MP3 player and I also got heavily into piracy (I remember it had a small screen so I tried to compress and stuff a full movie into it, which I successfully did by learning about and messing with ffmpeg settings, for example). Then when I got an early iPhone, I was flabbergasted as to how locked down the thing was (no, I do not want to sync my entire phone audio contents to iTunes), and soon after I switched to Android. Only recently have I started using a Mac and that's only because for historical reasons it's not locked down like the rest of Apple's devices, you can actually run whatever software you want on it without needing to go through a walled garden.
- sheiyei 1y ago
  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.
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    If you are still into wired headphones, the basic apple earbuds are a pretty good value at $19. I like them enough to have ordered new ones when I've lost the old ones.
    - sheiyei 1y ago
      If you happen to have the specific ear shape that their uncushioned hard plastic shape requires, they do sound good.
throwaway290 1y ago
> When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us. Idk if this is about age or sex or location but in Apple Stores in Asia I play another fun game: just stand and wait until anybody talks to me. Could take 20+ minutes no problems. I play on my phone or I try to stare down staff but they chat among themselves and make sure to not accidentally look. If the store has only one entrance and there is unoccupied staff, they sometimes assault me with questions when I enter. But even in those stores as soon as I browsed and made a choice and ready to buy they vanish magically!
natch 1y ago
ArchOS MP3 player. Jukebox. Back before the big companies (Creative) discovered the concept. https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B000050NPX https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B...
oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
I can imagine that sprinting out of an Apple store in the US would work out better for some people than others...
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  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.
janeway 1y ago
I’ve just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. His vision was extraordinary, recognising that even the design of the stores was integral to the product itself. Every layer of engineering was deeply intertwined with aesthetic design. I’ve always shared that belief, but I’m now fully committed to pursuing it without compromise in my own products. It’s proving even more challenging than I’d imagined to make highly technical things feel simple and intuitive for users. I was recently thinking the exact same thing as the author here; as a teen I got my ipod and instantly respected the graceful design and felt shocked how shoddy my previous cheap mp3 player was in comparison. I am also convinced that he was fully responsible for keeping Apple on this path and that it is almost impossible to stop others from diluting the craftsmanship towards mediocrity as the group size grows. Big CEOs get labelled as greedy exploiters in a single brushstroke by people who don’t seem to care to read up.
SwtCyber 1y ago
It's wild how a dumb little gadget from Walmart could quietly steer your whole trajectory, while the shiny luxury item just left a more photogenic memory
lrvick 1y ago
My favorite thing to do at Apple stores as a teen was jailbreak display phones and setup reverse ssh tunnels on them, for reasons.
- api 1y ago
  Sniff. Childhood. Sniff. I was a teen in the late 90s and did analogous things with school and store display PCs.
anonu 1y ago
Was it the rio mp3 player? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 I got this in 1999... So it might not fit your exact timeframe. My friend put Tupac's Changes song on there. That wasn't my first mp3 but it was the first on a pocket sized device.
prokopton 1y ago
My first Mac was before the Apple Store. Got it at a CompUSA Apple department. Still a magical experience to see a bunch of Macs gathered together in the same place.
jchw 1y ago
I definitely won't forget the cheap MP3 player I had when I was younger, a Sandisk Sansa Clip+, running Rockbox for much of its life. That thing was crazy small, had great audio quality (something something frequency response,) could play DOOM (on a tiny monochrome screen) and pretty much whatever audio files you cared about, had a decent battery life, and to top it off, it was expandable via microSD. Certainly iPods were slicker and cooler, but I definitely didn't care. No SD card slot, had to be synced with iTunes, etc. Was not for me.
- pxc 1y ago
  > Certainly iPods were slicker and cooler, but I definitely didn't care. No SD card slot, had to be synced with iTunes, etc. Was not for me. I got an iPod Nano when I was in 8th or 9th grade, and I loved it. I loved it for its slickness, its fancy display, etc. Even so, I didn't want iTunes, as I had a much superior player anyway. And I couldn't run it on my own computer even if I wanted to, because by then I was a habitual Linux user. That was okay! Libgpod had good support for syncing with iPods, even though their on-disk format was needlessly obscure. But I noticed something, after plugging my iPod into the school computers (which had iTunes) to copy some music onto it updated its firmware. Syncing stopped working! In the lifetime of that device, I went on to witness a series of firmware updates that made no improvements at all, but broke syncing with 3rd-party apps. My previous MP3 player experience was with the excellent MuVo TX FM, which was basically a USB stick with a battery, and let you load music onto it just by naively copying files. Apple's behavior struck me as extremely user-hostile, coercive, condescending, and irritating, and I never forgot it. I decided then and there that that iPod Nano would be my last Apple purchase. I kept that promise for more than two decades, even after deciding I wanted to own an Apple computer, making sure to always buy used, even for recent models. I finally caved this year, when I bought a gift for someone else based on their preferences and needs, and wanted to give them something properly brand new. As for the iPod: it, too, eventually received a Rockbox port, which I installed on it and quite enjoyed for a while, before eventually giving it away.
OisinMoran 1y ago
It is interesting that the slickness of Apple products now kind of just shuts down any curiosity about the inner workings. They attempt to look like monolithic alien technology and they'd rather you not take them apart, despite the origins of the company being in serving that exact type of person. Bring back translucent tech!
bArray 1y ago
I remember the Apple store in my local area being the most elegant of the available stores, well lit and surrounded with glass windows, being exceptionally clean inside and always busy. The staff were well dressed and the atmosphere pleasant. I ventured inside a few times to checkout the latest technological offerings of Apple, and was impressed. None of the sales staff ever approached me, but I was able to afford the devices, despite perhaps being dressed as though I couldn't. The irony is that even some of the poorest people in the UK I see walking around with iPhones and their children use iPads. I never purchased or owned an Apple device to this day, but I did appreciate the well built hardware and snappy software.
tempaway43563 1y ago
oh man I am so old
andsoitis 1y ago
> an interactive luxury good Apple hired Ahrendts in 2013 to head its retail efforts. She previously led Burberry, where she transformed the brand into a global luxury icon. Before Ahrendts, Steve Jobs brought in Ron Johnson in 2000 to lead the retail revamp. Johnson, had experience at Target.
johnboiles 1y ago
The more redneck version of this I did as a kid was capture the flag in Walmart

253 points by nivethan 1y ago

> We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands. The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod. I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, 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. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.

ericmay 1y ago
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.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Smartphone hardware is almost completely useless because of the software. At this point it's pretty obvious that the potential (but unrealizable) utility is just more of the luxury illusion they're selling.
  - zxexz 1y ago
    I’m genuinely curious what your view on the unrealized potential is! I would love something new to hack on.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      It's a social problem not a technical one.
      - leakycap 1y ago
        I think it is the lack of a non-touch keyboard, not a social problem. I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.
      - HaZeust 1y ago
        Great! The fun thing about social problems is that you, yourself, can make routines and picky-preferences in life to avoid most of them for yourself! You could start today by taking away HackerNews from your routine - as well as other platforms and sites that perpetuate behaviors that meet your criticisms. If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!
        msgodel 1y ago
        Yeah I actually don't own a smartphone at all. I don't know why you think I shouldn't talk about them after making that decision though.
        HaZeust 1y ago
        Well, with that in mind, have you noticed the problems you speak about going down in life? Was I right about the core of what a social problem is - and how it can be fixed? You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!
  - rekenaut 1y ago
    In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?
    - msgodel 1y ago
      The few among those things that even reliably function are covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them. The illusion is that you're getting a computer and not a collection of knickknacks and appliances.
      - Gigachad 1y ago
        Almost none of those things have ads on the iPhone. All of them function reliably.
        worthless-trash 1y ago
        I mean, you're getting advertisements in your iWallet.. so...
        Gigachad 1y ago
        I'm not as that was US only but yes that was outrageous and hopefully never happens again.
        bacon_waffle 1y ago
        I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
        > covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)
- rekenaut 1y ago
  Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.
  - eigen 1y ago
    > the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase and you keep a phone 1-8 years but a car 3-20 years or 4x as long? seems like a bad ratio
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > 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. Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did. Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.
  - jwagenet 1y ago
    I don’t agree at all. Neither is Rolex high utility, nor is anyone fooled that an analog watch which sets you back 3-4 orders of magnitude more than digital/smart watches should be higher utility. Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Rolex is not high utility, it is harsh environment. Real Antarctic expeditions, mountaineering, pre-GPS flight and navigation, SCUBA diving, sea navigation, desert navigation, etc. You could rely on your Rolex not to be the component that fails and gets you killed or lost. Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.
      - hx8 1y ago
        Except mechanical watches fail all the time. The sapphire glass shatters, or a strong impact disrupts the movement, or a user doesn't screw down the crown and water enters the device. They require expensive regular services. Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.
zxexz 1y ago
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)
gertlex 1y ago
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.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> 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.
- agos 1y ago
  It had been a while since I worked in a business adjacent to jewelry, but at the time the notion was that for a brand like Cartier or Tiffany, the precious metal/stones account for 10% of the selling price.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    What was the business adjacent to jewelry?
    - agos 1y ago
      The company I worked for offered a platform for investments in (fully allocated) gold. They launched a spin-off[1] for 24k jewels, priced at spot gold price*jewel weight, plus a fixed and known margin in percentage. I worked on the e-commerce for it. [1] https://mene.com https://mene.com
LeoPanthera 1y ago
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.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  Well, usually. There have been some absolute low-quality fiascos like the whole butterfly keyboard thing. But one thing that really stuck with me was a few years back when I was making a spreadsheet of standard tech choices available for new employees for a startup, and almost all the Linux or Windows laptops out there that I could trust to last out of the box as long as a (non-butterfly-keyboard) Macbook had a baseline of 1080p screens, with upcharges just to get to 1440p. It might be better these days, but I felt like I was taking crazy pills just trying to find a certain baseline of quality for tech that would be getting used all the time every day.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    It feels almost like there’s this weird game that laptop manufacturers are playing to find something to skimp on with their models. Might be the screen, the screen’s antiglare coating, keyboard/chassis flex, input device quality, port placement, cooling capability, noise, maybe something else entirely, but it’s almost a rule that some aspect of the laptop must suck. Even the best reviewed models out there have some more-than-papercut flaws. Screens have gotten better thankfully, but now the thing is to use screen panels that are only practically usable at 1.5x/150% UI scaling for some reason. It’s better than being stuck with those horrid 1366x768 TN panels that used to plague laptops, but it’s still more annoying than panels that can do integer scaling well. Given the choice between 1.5x panel and its 1x decent resolution counterpart, I’d actually prefer the latter just because it’s less trouble.
carlosjobim 1y ago
Are you arguing that luxury is in the cost of production, rather than the quality of the product?

dusted 1y ago

> It's a shame I cannot remember what brand it was! I remember the iPod because it was a luxury good, but I think I owe that old Walmart MP3 player a lot more. Indeed. My first portable music player was a walkman, not a sony I think, but anyway, a portable cassette tape player.. I made my own mixtapes from other tapes, cd's and ozzy ossbournes "bark at the moon" vinyl. The next device was a portable CD player, I got a CD burner quite early on, damn, at that point in time, my harddrive was only maybe two hundred megabytes larger than a cd.. But it was good, I could do (sometimes less than perfect) cd-to-cd copies, and when I got MP3 files, I started being able to fit enough songs on the harddrive to make mix-cds.. The next device was my last portable music player, it was a "King" brand "mp4" player, which was a, still, tiny little 512 mib flash based device with some hardware buttons and an early oled color display.. I still have it, I don't use it too often, because I almost never need this type of device anymore, I listen to CDs in the card and at home I listen to CDs, vinyl and flac.. and at work it's a "hifi" headphone setup.

Suppafly 1y ago

>because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy I feel a lot of us have similar stories.

jordemort 1y ago

We used to play this same game at the Disney store, back in the 90’s

leakycap 1y ago
Mall Disney Store employees were micromanaged about the number of entry/exits vs. sales, which was measured by shift, so they definitely noticed!

secstate 1y ago

I wonder if it was the Creative Nomad [1] ... I had a Jukebox that had a 6GB spinning disk in it originally. Upgrading to a 20GB drive was the first real hackery thing I did with my old RedHat box. I had to buy an IDE converter too to move between the laptop connector to the desktop. That was also when I learned what happens if you dd a Creative Nomad Jukebox system image onto your root partition while the machine is running. The RedHat install stayed stable for about 20 minutes before weird things started failing and eventually the whole thing just locked up. Remember kids, always check you dd out file path! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad

gertlex 1y ago
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.
- water-data-dude 1y ago
  I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better. - If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section. - If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been. - On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!

fnord77 1y ago

weird, nowadays I struggle to find someone to help me at my local apple store (SF Union sq)

AzzyHN 1y ago
I mean, yeah, an Apple store in the heart of downtown full of tourists is bound to be pretty busy
- fnord77 1y ago
  It's pretty dead the times I go

analog31 1y ago

As recently as I've been in an apple store, the goods were out for people to touch.

paxys 1y ago

The experience has definitely changed, mainly because of how crowded most Apple stores get. While all the devices are still in the open there is no way employees can offer a personalized experience to every shopper and wanderer. You have to now make a reservation for that.

leakycap 1y ago
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.
LeoPanthera 1y ago
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.
crooked-v 1y ago
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.

JSR_FDED 1y ago

I remember the first time I went into an Apple Store. I was looking at a 17” PowerBook, salivating at the screen and performance but struggling with justifying the price tag. An incredibly nice lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. I told her I was thinking it over as it was a large purchase. She beamed and said “Of course, that’s totally understandable. In fact it takes on average 3 visits to an Apple Store before making a purchase”. It was the smartest, nicest, most low key way of saying don’t feel pressure…you’ll be coming back, and then you’ll buy the machine you’ve always wanted. Very on brand. And surprisingly still not really copied by others.

emsign 1y ago
That comes off as arrogant as a corporate face can be: Oh, don't worry darling. You will be back for more and we know each time your cravings will be stronger until you finally give in. See you and have a lovely day.
piperswe 1y ago
Porsche has the same philosophy, from what I've heard and experienced
- leakycap 1y ago
  The Cayenne is one of the only SUVs I looked at where the sales experience made me more interested in the brand & left me with a good impression of the dealer. I hadn't seriously considered a Porsche until I learned they make niche parts for cars for decades - like interior bits and trim that most brands stop making/carrying after about 10 years. You can get parts for a 2002-2016 Cayenne at the dealer, but even though it shares a TON of components with the 2002-2016 Touareg you won't be able to get the parts from VW that you can still source from Porsche for those same years.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    They even make retrofit CarPlay head units designed to fit in their classic cars both physically and design-wise https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/porsche-carplay-classic-head-units/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/porsche-carplay-classic-head-...

laidoffamazon 1y ago

The Apple Store used to be the embodiment of everything I didn't have when I was growing up - status, the lives the people in the sample pictures had, any sort of individual money or agency - now I have an Apple Store in walking distance and can buy whatever I want. It's a nice shift, even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have.

Ashkee 1y ago
It’s wild how things change, right? When I started using leadsapp, I realized small steps can add up to real progress. Having access so close makes a difference, even if the big picture feels far off.
leakycap 1y ago
> even though I still don't have the life those actors in the sample pictures or Apple ads have (nobody does -- don't forget there are bounce lights and 20 people just out of frame...)
- philwelch 1y ago
  Next you’re going to tell me Jony Ive didn’t spend every day in a featureless white room meditating on the ideal form of a laptop or phone or MP3 player (a rounded rectangle, it turns out)
  - leakycap 1y ago
    I think that's totally accurate, actually.
- laidoffamazon 1y ago
  if TikTok is any indication it is the typical life of a Google engineer

ljsocal 1y ago

Having worked in said fruit stand for several years, I can assure you that you were neither undetected nor unplayed. We kept score, too!

BubbleRings 1y ago
Okay now we need more details here, please!

danpalmer 1y ago

A few years back I went in to buy an Apple TV. Walked in, straight up to the Apple TV display, stood using it for a few mins, stood looking outwards towards the rest of the store, tried to make eye contact with any staff. No one paid any attention, staff happily chatting away to each other. I couldn't have looked more ready to buy without waving cash around. Apple Store employees are definitely trained better than the average shop, but they are far from luxury.

Larrikin 1y ago
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.
- hx8 1y ago
  Some luxury brands will play hard to get, others will fawn over customers. Different people want different experiences. How expensive the item in the catalog might change the level of service, but the brand will use a similar playbook across the entire catalog.
- danpalmer 1y ago
  This may be their thinking, but if so I feel that would be down to bad training. In my experience the Apple TV skews hard towards those who have a lot of Apple products. It's priced far higher than the rest of that market. Most people buying an iPhone are buying a Fire stick or a cheap smart TV. I'd bet most people buying an Apple TV have an iPhone and a Mac. It would be like going into a Burberry store and shopping for replacement buttons for your $3000 coat.
  - oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
    I'd also imagine that Apple TV is a great entry point—especially given the relatively cheap price—into the ecosystem. It's like the modern equivalent of the iPod.
1y ago

throwaway_1237 1y ago

Steve Jobs would have loved this story.

sandspar 1y ago

+1 for the mention of Zune. I started with a Zune, a bright green and brown one, then went to iPods. Like the author and their first Walmart MP3 player, my first MP3 player, my Zune, left a much bigger impression on me than all of my later iPods. I think there's an alternate history where Zune, with all of its weird personalization and oddness, won out over iPod's sleek luxury. In some ways I think that that alternate reality might have been a bit more fun.

leakycap 1y ago
iPods got out of the way and could be used in your pocket I got a Zune and immediately realized MS had no idea why people liked the iPod Different folks like different things, but I don't think a big menu of lowercase text is more fun than the iPod in any of its variations
- sandspar 1y ago
  That's reasonable. iPod was probably a better product overall, but I think Zune had more character. In Starcraft terms, I'd say that iPod was the pure Protoss and Zune was the primal Zerg. I guess I'd rather live on a Protoss world, but you can't deny that it'd be interesting to visit a Zerg one.
  - leakycap 1y ago
    Great analogy! I still use my iPod, because for whatever reason the OG battery hasn't died even though it is a FireWire model. It also, shockingly, sounds WAY better with any pair of decent headphones than any of my AirPods including the Max. Not a fair comparison since a wire will always have more bandwidth for fidelity, but the difference in listening experience on an old iPod vs a modern iPhone is so shocking I find that modern iPhone listening is like diet soda and is somewhat unfulfilling (I have Apple Lossless turned on, but the sound chip + low power of modern headphones + no wired connection... loses something) I don't mean in a "vinyl is better" sense... I mean, everyone I've demo'd this to has looked at me with big eyes when they put the iPod on and listen to the same song vs. the same headphones plugged into a modern phone. It's weird, especially since the iPods of this era can't do anything close to Lossless... they're 160-192k AACs so the limited RAM cache can play a full song without pausing on an old iPod.

leakycap 1y ago

Loved the honesty of this line > Part of my brain was saying "this place is bullshit and I use it to clown on the staff," and part of my brain was saying "I want the luxury good!! and I am going to purchase it now."

userbinator 1y ago

The MP3 player I had before that iPod was a much more generic one. I've spent the last few days occasionally checking Wikipedia and other places online to see if I can tell which one it was, and I have absolutely no idea. Might've been an S1, which arguably was better than Apple's products in many ways, and likely sold a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player

computator 1y ago
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.
- bobsmooth 1y ago
  DankPods on youtube has a long running series documenting these low cost mp3 players, or as he calls them, nuggets.
- longtimelistnr 1y ago
  i remember it very well, i bought a Sony at F.Y.E. at the mall. as a child, my mother insisted on Sony as it was reputable brand (thank god because they truly were better devices). But the non-Zune/Sony/iPod selections were all duplicates of the same garbage, this was ~2007.
mystifyingpoi 1y ago
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.

larusso 1y ago

I still run the theory that Apple has actors on staff to just “be cool at the Apple Store”. I once went into the local store during daytime in summer (my lunch break) to pick up an order. There was a very attractive young woman dancing next to the headphones seemingly testing out a pair of AirPod Max. And the rest of the store was also filled with strangely attractive persons. I wasn’t able to verify my theory because I have a work life and don’t happen to walk by an Apple Store during working hours. But in my mind I believe it would totally be Apple if they hire extra cool folk to make the store feel more hip and not empty.

namanyayg 1y ago
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?
- jojobas 1y ago
  If someone did, would you believe him?
- vidarh 1y ago
  A simple option would be to approach lower-tier influencers and offer them some free stuff to hang out, and get posts in return as well.
- fortran77 1y ago
  I'm sure they hire people to line up in front of the stores, too.
divbzero 1y ago
Maybe they have employees rotate through an undercover role, but more likely the store just attracts cool people.
- lupire 1y ago
  Attracts people who like to display expensive decorations, at least.

divbzero 1y ago

We had the same game in high school, except for a clothing retailer. The Apple Store didn’t exist yet.

jojobas 1y ago

Reads like a confession of a deprogrammed cult member, and probably is.

sour-taste 1y ago

Best mp3 player I ever had was the SanDisk sansa clip. Just loaded music off an ad card and weight almost nothing. Worked great.

osculum 1y ago
I still have mine with rockbox installed. I had to replace the battery, and the clip broke years ago, but I haven’t found anything like it to replace it.
- cnity 1y ago
  I had this setup many years ago too. Then the clip zip, also with rockbox. Loved that thing.
ragazzina 1y ago
I wish even one thing I use everyday were as nice as a Sansa Clip+. Solid yet lightweight thick plastic with indestructible buttons.

satvikpendem 1y ago

> [The older non-iPod MP3 player] left a bigger impact on my life, really, than the iPod, because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy. This increased my computer proficiency dramatically (though not to the point where I became a habitual Linux user) and set off a chain of events that made me much more comfortable with amateur web development and eventually game development. This is such a funny end to this article that is reflected in my time too using Apple and non-Apple products. I had a similar generic MP3 player and I also got heavily into piracy (I remember it had a small screen so I tried to compress and stuff a full movie into it, which I successfully did by learning about and messing with ffmpeg settings, for example). Then when I got an early iPhone, I was flabbergasted as to how locked down the thing was (no, I do not want to sync my entire phone audio contents to iTunes), and soon after I switched to Android. Only recently have I started using a Mac and that's only because for historical reasons it's not locked down like the rest of Apple's devices, you can actually run whatever software you want on it without needing to go through a walled garden.

sheiyei 1y ago
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.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  If you are still into wired headphones, the basic apple earbuds are a pretty good value at $19. I like them enough to have ordered new ones when I've lost the old ones.
  - sheiyei 1y ago
    If you happen to have the specific ear shape that their uncushioned hard plastic shape requires, they do sound good.

throwaway290 1y ago

> When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us. Idk if this is about age or sex or location but in Apple Stores in Asia I play another fun game: just stand and wait until anybody talks to me. Could take 20+ minutes no problems. I play on my phone or I try to stare down staff but they chat among themselves and make sure to not accidentally look. If the store has only one entrance and there is unoccupied staff, they sometimes assault me with questions when I enter. But even in those stores as soon as I browsed and made a choice and ready to buy they vanish magically!

natch 1y ago

ArchOS MP3 player. Jukebox. Back before the big companies (Creative) discovered the concept. https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B000050NPX https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B...

oneeyedpigeon 1y ago

I can imagine that sprinting out of an Apple store in the US would work out better for some people than others...

tonyedgecombe 1y ago
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.

janeway 1y ago

I’ve just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. His vision was extraordinary, recognising that even the design of the stores was integral to the product itself. Every layer of engineering was deeply intertwined with aesthetic design. I’ve always shared that belief, but I’m now fully committed to pursuing it without compromise in my own products. It’s proving even more challenging than I’d imagined to make highly technical things feel simple and intuitive for users. I was recently thinking the exact same thing as the author here; as a teen I got my ipod and instantly respected the graceful design and felt shocked how shoddy my previous cheap mp3 player was in comparison. I am also convinced that he was fully responsible for keeping Apple on this path and that it is almost impossible to stop others from diluting the craftsmanship towards mediocrity as the group size grows. Big CEOs get labelled as greedy exploiters in a single brushstroke by people who don’t seem to care to read up.

SwtCyber 1y ago

It's wild how a dumb little gadget from Walmart could quietly steer your whole trajectory, while the shiny luxury item just left a more photogenic memory

lrvick 1y ago

My favorite thing to do at Apple stores as a teen was jailbreak display phones and setup reverse ssh tunnels on them, for reasons.

api 1y ago
Sniff. Childhood. Sniff. I was a teen in the late 90s and did analogous things with school and store display PCs.

anonu 1y ago

Was it the rio mp3 player? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 I got this in 1999... So it might not fit your exact timeframe. My friend put Tupac's Changes song on there. That wasn't my first mp3 but it was the first on a pocket sized device.

prokopton 1y ago

My first Mac was before the Apple Store. Got it at a CompUSA Apple department. Still a magical experience to see a bunch of Macs gathered together in the same place.

jchw 1y ago

I definitely won't forget the cheap MP3 player I had when I was younger, a Sandisk Sansa Clip+, running Rockbox for much of its life. That thing was crazy small, had great audio quality (something something frequency response,) could play DOOM (on a tiny monochrome screen) and pretty much whatever audio files you cared about, had a decent battery life, and to top it off, it was expandable via microSD. Certainly iPods were slicker and cooler, but I definitely didn't care. No SD card slot, had to be synced with iTunes, etc. Was not for me.

pxc 1y ago
> Certainly iPods were slicker and cooler, but I definitely didn't care. No SD card slot, had to be synced with iTunes, etc. Was not for me. I got an iPod Nano when I was in 8th or 9th grade, and I loved it. I loved it for its slickness, its fancy display, etc. Even so, I didn't want iTunes, as I had a much superior player anyway. And I couldn't run it on my own computer even if I wanted to, because by then I was a habitual Linux user. That was okay! Libgpod had good support for syncing with iPods, even though their on-disk format was needlessly obscure. But I noticed something, after plugging my iPod into the school computers (which had iTunes) to copy some music onto it updated its firmware. Syncing stopped working! In the lifetime of that device, I went on to witness a series of firmware updates that made no improvements at all, but broke syncing with 3rd-party apps. My previous MP3 player experience was with the excellent MuVo TX FM, which was basically a USB stick with a battery, and let you load music onto it just by naively copying files. Apple's behavior struck me as extremely user-hostile, coercive, condescending, and irritating, and I never forgot it. I decided then and there that that iPod Nano would be my last Apple purchase. I kept that promise for more than two decades, even after deciding I wanted to own an Apple computer, making sure to always buy used, even for recent models. I finally caved this year, when I bought a gift for someone else based on their preferences and needs, and wanted to give them something properly brand new. As for the iPod: it, too, eventually received a Rockbox port, which I installed on it and quite enjoyed for a while, before eventually giving it away.

OisinMoran 1y ago

It is interesting that the slickness of Apple products now kind of just shuts down any curiosity about the inner workings. They attempt to look like monolithic alien technology and they'd rather you not take them apart, despite the origins of the company being in serving that exact type of person. Bring back translucent tech!

bArray 1y ago

I remember the Apple store in my local area being the most elegant of the available stores, well lit and surrounded with glass windows, being exceptionally clean inside and always busy. The staff were well dressed and the atmosphere pleasant. I ventured inside a few times to checkout the latest technological offerings of Apple, and was impressed. None of the sales staff ever approached me, but I was able to afford the devices, despite perhaps being dressed as though I couldn't. The irony is that even some of the poorest people in the UK I see walking around with iPhones and their children use iPads. I never purchased or owned an Apple device to this day, but I did appreciate the well built hardware and snappy software.

tempaway43563 1y ago

oh man I am so old

andsoitis 1y ago

> an interactive luxury good Apple hired Ahrendts in 2013 to head its retail efforts. She previously led Burberry, where she transformed the brand into a global luxury icon. Before Ahrendts, Steve Jobs brought in Ron Johnson in 2000 to lead the retail revamp. Johnson, had experience at Target.

johnboiles 1y ago

The more redneck version of this I did as a kid was capture the flag in Walmart