I finally got round to going into my local Apple Store in London’s Regent Street
Expecting it to be amazing I came out with mixed emotions
Of course I couldn’t walk out of there without buying something, so I bought a new keyboard to replace my existing replacement one. I broke the original USB one a couple of years ago after trashing it at uni – spilt too much beer on it and it got thrown around the room a little bit too much! Replaced it temporarily with my old ADB Apple Extended Keyboard II – arguably Apple’s best keyboard… except that it’s not USB, so I had to connect it with an ADB to USB adaptor
But back to the store… my initial impressions were: this is not a shop, it’s a showroom!
I felt like I needed to be wearing an iPod and talking about the latest airport extreme accessory to use it to listen to my music from two rooms away!
But my mac isn’t like that! I don’t own an iPod, and don’t have any intentions of owning one in the short term – am more likely to buy one of the competitor’s options
I also felt that this wasn’t a computer shop because there were assistants everywhere except whenever you wanted them – I had to fight to talk to someone to ask advice about upgrade options and then where I could find a keyboard that wasn’t a bluetooth one. Eventually one assistant offered to look to see if they had any in stock, and it was pretty good value @ £19 including VAT
On my way out I asked someone if they were going to be showing the Macworld keynote next week, to which the response was as if to say “what’s a keynote” based on the expression. This was followed by a more official “We don’t show Keynotes” – that was the icing on the cake – why not!?!
Back home, the keyboard seems good, though it crashed my mac a couple of times – teething troubles i guess with all my hardware, and i don’t like the left ctrl button or the slopes, but at least i can drop into open firmware, single user mode, the boot manager and zap the pram again. It’s also good to be able to type the “~” key again which seemed to disappear when I upgraded to 10.4 – dunno why, but now I’ve got it back! Oh, and the eject and opt-eject keys now open the correct DVD drives – on the old keyboard, they both opened the slave on the IDE bus.
The arrow keys seem a bit weird, I do miss the power key which is now the eject button, as now I have to use ctrl-eject to bring up the shutdown/sleep/logout dialogue box. Haven’t even tried the volume keys – they look a bit weird. Also, as many have commented, it’s a shame the F-keys don’t have spaces every 4 keys like the old keyboards. And again, the downward slope on the bottom row (command, ctrl, spacebar, etc) is very weird, and upward slope on the F-keys will take a bit of getting used to
I liked the nice touches in the packaging – the USB extension lead, and the covers for the plugs on the leads which I will be keeping for my other USB cables – very well done and that they give you a nice bag that you can carry on your shoulder
Also on my way out I picked up the event schedule which looks really good if I had the time to practically live in the apple store covering a different topic every hour. You can follow what’s going on using Apple’s Event Widget (requires dashboard ie OSX 10.4 Tiger or equivalent)
I’m waiting to find out when the really local Apple Store in Brent Cross, London will be opening – have walked past it several times, and would be really convenient. Having said that, I can’t not add how disappointed I was by the range of products and how overpriced everything felt. Nothing felt like it was a bargain (except for the keyboard! and that wasn’t even on the shelves). USB card readers for £30, DVD-Rs for £4 each, Firewire drives £70 for 40GB – none of it felt like something I wanted to buy, and more like something I might write down and go online to find somewhere cheaper.
Would I go back to the Regent Street shop again? Not unless I was in the area and had some time to kill – like I say, it felt more like a showroom than a shop
Accessories were stacked underneath showroom iPods, Scanners, and iMacs. Even Powermac G5s seemed to be pushed into the background to show off the consumer products
It’s a shame, but perhaps I had too high an expectation of it
I think that is to be expected. The iPod is bringing Apple money in a quantity it never had before so you bet your booties Apple will give it a big percentage of the store’s surface to showcase the music device.
And it is a fact that the iPod crowd will buy stuff that you could look down upon and think “This is way too pricey and makes no sense”. Remember the iPod Socks episode? I found that pretty outrageous myself. The iPod crowd has money to burn, baby!
So you, as a serious computer user, felt left out and right now Apple is making the iPod crowd feel like it is at home in their store and with their iPod. When those iPoders start thinking, they’ll realize maybe owning a Mac isn’t so bad, that it’s cool in fact, so they’ll buy one. But that’s further down the road so you have to bear with Apple on this one. The big movement could happen in about a year I think, if Apple can keep the coolness effect going on for such a long time.
Just the fact that the browser stats for Safari usage is going up means that there is definitely a movement there, gains in market share. Which will benefit us all, serious and casual Mac users alike, in the long run.