> 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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I remember the first time I tried to buy something at an Apple store. Usually avoid 'em cause I don't like Apple as a company, but I do like their laptops. I'd decided an M3 air was gonna be perfect as a general use laptop.
Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.
Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...
Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".
I will never forget one of my earliest Apple purchases being a macbook pro. I was convinced that I needed a certain specd machine that was more expensive. The person I was working with instead of just accepting what I thought I wanted asked me about what I was doing with it and really encouraged the lower cost machine.
I ended up getting the lower cost machine and it was still great. It was still a Macbook pro. I don't remember what the spec difference was now but I do remember thinking back and realizing it was right. The higher specs really would not have added anymore life to the machine so it wasn't like I upgraded sooner than I would have otherwise.
Complete opposite of nearly any other tech purchasing process, always seem to want me to spend as much money as possible.
Yesterday, I went into Best Buy with a friend to look at soundbars. As we were looking, a young man came up and said "Do you have any questions?" - I said we were just browsing, and he smiled and that was that.
He came back a few minutes later when he saw me scanning a QR code on the price tag. Odd since I signaled I didn't need anything. He asked again, "Anything you need help with?" - This time I was still wishy-washy but said "Yeah, I'm checking the inputs on this soundbar to see if it has 3.5mm and how many HDMI ports it has".
And without asking any more details, he smiled and said "Alright!" and walked away. We were completely baffled.
This was definitely the way Apple (used to) teach their employees. The 3 big “rules” were
1) No upsell pressure. We all got a flat hourly wage, so whether you bought the 5k computer or the 1k computer, we earned the same money. So focus on selling the customer the right computer for their needs.
2) It’s better to send the customer somewhere else or let them walk out the door than it is to sell them something that won’t work for them. Sort of a corollary to the first item, but the idea was more than anything, customers should feel like they could trust us. And if building that trust meant telling the customer “we do have USB cables, but the Belkin one we’re selling for $25 is no better for your printer than the generic brand Best Buy is selling across the street” then that’s what we did. A customer who trusts us is a customer that comes back, and a customer that comes back is a customer that buys more things. Sure they may not buy the USB cable today, but next month when they’re buying some other thing for their computer, they might just pick up some other cable or item that they might be able to get cheaper elsewhere, but they’re already here, we have it and they trust us to stock quality items.
3) Never ever make something up or guess. All the computers are fully functional and hooked up to the internet for a reason. If you don’t know the answer, tell that to the customer and take them over to a computer and look it up with them. You get a chance to demo the machine, you get a chance to let the customer try out the machine and most importantly you maintain that trust. The customer can feel confident you’re not bullshitting them, and they can feel confident in the answer you finally do reach because you looked it up together.
Apple’s opposition to being anything like CompUSA or other computer retailers at the time was IMO a huge factor in making their stores as big and popular as they were and are. Unfortunately my experience by the time I left was Apple’s rapid growth meant they were hiring more and more from outside the pool of “Apple enthusiasts ” and more and more from the wider retail world. It’s really hard to “untrain” the “high pressure commission sales” mindset from folks who have needed to live off that sort of sales approach. We’d also started to see some of it come down from above in the form of tracking individual “attachment metrics” like AppleCare. Back when AppleCare didn’t have accidental damage coverage, the pressure to sell AppleCare with the product in question rather than after the fact (at the time, up to 1 year after purchase) was antithetical to their otherwise strong focus on no upsells and building trust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm not American enough, but that experience sounds much more like luxury to me than having an employee bugging you to buy without you explicitly asking.
Apple’s logic is not to put pressure on prospective customers. That means that they don’t have a policy to talk to everyone who walks in the door looking around. I don’t like it either, its disquieting. But I respect their logic.
For something like an Apple TV, you can just walk up to the product, scan it with your phone, pay for it, and leave without any employee interaction. They're more interested in selling the things like iPhones, iPads, and Macs that require employee interaction.
+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.
> 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."
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.
I remember I had one called Pikaone Le Stick. No info on that brand anywhere, and what a stupid name tbh. Probably the exact same Chinese stuff as all the others, but hey it did work really well.
I remember thinking that people using iTunes to manage their music were complete idiots when you could simply drag and drop MP3 files into the drive. I still think that, to be honest.
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.
> [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.
> 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!
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.
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
57 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 79.4 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.
Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...
Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".
I ended up getting the lower cost machine and it was still great. It was still a Macbook pro. I don't remember what the spec difference was now but I do remember thinking back and realizing it was right. The higher specs really would not have added anymore life to the machine so it wasn't like I upgraded sooner than I would have otherwise.
Complete opposite of nearly any other tech purchasing process, always seem to want me to spend as much money as possible.
He came back a few minutes later when he saw me scanning a QR code on the price tag. Odd since I signaled I didn't need anything. He asked again, "Anything you need help with?" - This time I was still wishy-washy but said "Yeah, I'm checking the inputs on this soundbar to see if it has 3.5mm and how many HDMI ports it has".
And without asking any more details, he smiled and said "Alright!" and walked away. We were completely baffled.
1) No upsell pressure. We all got a flat hourly wage, so whether you bought the 5k computer or the 1k computer, we earned the same money. So focus on selling the customer the right computer for their needs.
2) It’s better to send the customer somewhere else or let them walk out the door than it is to sell them something that won’t work for them. Sort of a corollary to the first item, but the idea was more than anything, customers should feel like they could trust us. And if building that trust meant telling the customer “we do have USB cables, but the Belkin one we’re selling for $25 is no better for your printer than the generic brand Best Buy is selling across the street” then that’s what we did. A customer who trusts us is a customer that comes back, and a customer that comes back is a customer that buys more things. Sure they may not buy the USB cable today, but next month when they’re buying some other thing for their computer, they might just pick up some other cable or item that they might be able to get cheaper elsewhere, but they’re already here, we have it and they trust us to stock quality items.
3) Never ever make something up or guess. All the computers are fully functional and hooked up to the internet for a reason. If you don’t know the answer, tell that to the customer and take them over to a computer and look it up with them. You get a chance to demo the machine, you get a chance to let the customer try out the machine and most importantly you maintain that trust. The customer can feel confident you’re not bullshitting them, and they can feel confident in the answer you finally do reach because you looked it up together.
Apple’s opposition to being anything like CompUSA or other computer retailers at the time was IMO a huge factor in making their stores as big and popular as they were and are. Unfortunately my experience by the time I left was Apple’s rapid growth meant they were hiring more and more from outside the pool of “Apple enthusiasts ” and more and more from the wider retail world. It’s really hard to “untrain” the “high pressure commission sales” mindset from folks who have needed to live off that sort of sales approach. We’d also started to see some of it come down from above in the form of tracking individual “attachment metrics” like AppleCare. Back when AppleCare didn’t have accidental damage coverage, the pressure to sell AppleCare with the product in question rather than after the fact (at the time, up to 1 year after purchase) was antithetical to their otherwise strong focus on no upsells and building trust.
Apple Store employees are definitely trained better than the average shop, but they are far from luxury.
> 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."
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
I remember thinking that people using iTunes to manage their music were complete idiots when you could simply drag and drop MP3 files into the drive. I still think that, to be honest.
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.
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!
https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B...
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.