She'll be Apple's
Andrew P Street spends a Wednesday morning at the media launch of the Sydney Apple Store
Apple is less a brand than a cult. After all, how many brands would lure people to cross the country to camp outside a store days before the doors open? After all, it’s a shop: a very, very large one that is still going to be there days, even weeks, after the official opening. It’s not some Turkish bazaar that’s going to be packed up and moved to the next town for the following week’s market. They’d be incredibly hard pressed to pack it up in any case: as Apple’s Senior Vice President of Retail Ron Johnson pointed out in his welcome address, the three-story mezzanine of their George Street flagship store contains 700 square metres of glass, made of 15-metre tall slabs of laminated glass (the largest ever made, reportedly). That’d be damn near impossible to put on the back of a camel – as would the three levels of retail and customer support that makes up the 215th Apple store (and second largest on the planet, second only to the Regent Street store in London).
The cultishness continues inside the store as the relentlessly friendly Apple staff ask if Time Out are excited and having a good time, politely refusing to be photographed, filmed or answer questions not directly related to what we’ve just been told about the store (they may or may not be opening other stores in Australia at some undisclosed future point, and all questions relating to iPhones, no matter how obliquely presented, are met with polite silence).
It’s not really a surprise that Apple give off this strangely insular vibe: they’ve always been less about selling stuff (although, as this store demonstrates, they do actually sell an awful lot of stuff) and more about building up a little community. Johnson’s talk about enhancing “the ownership experience” washed over us, but the most interesting thing was that the store features free training seminars in Mac programs (including their “ProLabs” for specialised training in using Final Cut Pro and other multimedia programs) and their “Genius Bar” offering actual, honest-to-good face-to-face tech support with Apple’s highly-trained Geniuses (and Johnson proudly declared that most problems that can’t be fixed on the spot will be solved same-day, which is a bold claim indeed). It’s this from-the-get-go commitment to user support that sets the store apart from being a big shop what things get sold out of: if they can follow through on their promises, this is going to set a new standard for IT retail.
The shop itself is, it has to be said, an architectural marvel: the aforementioned mezzanine fills the store with natural light, while the glass staircases that lead to the first and second floors keep the motif of light and space going. The ground floor is nothing but Macs: 90 of them, to be exact, with every current desktop and laptop model represented, while the second floor is software, consumer electronics (read: every damn make and model of iPods) and both Apple-brand and second-party accessories. The fact that there were four tables of iPods – which ran, somewhat suspiciously, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, iPod Classic and iPod Nano, suggested that perhaps one of the Nano tables might be poised to shortly display something else, something perhaps a little bit phone-ier about which no-one would speak.
Yes, we were excited and yes, we had a good time. For Apple users, this is the one stop shop of your dreams. For everyone else: oh, just wait. You’ll be converted soon enough.
While Andrew was trying to prise information out of geniuses, Daniel Boud was capturing the scene.
See his shots if you can't wait till tomorrow's opening to see what's in store!
Apple’s Sydney retail store opens at 5pm on Thu 19 June. And Time Out will be there.