Posted by nivethan 4 days ago
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.
Go outside of tech though and the Apple Store experience is commonplace. Apple itself copied the concept directly from high end fashion houses.
I went in to try the (then new) Surface Studio (the drafting table like AIO) and they couldn’t find the peripheral knob. But it kept triggering, but it turned out employees would mess around with customers by spinning it while they used it.
Of course that’s just one store, but I walked by several and they all just looked depressing inside. Layouts felt about as poorly planned as a Best Buy or staples display, and even things as simple as lighting was harsher.
It’s just not as simple as making a store. The store has to provide the right vibe, and Microsoft don’t understand vibe.
Anyhoo, they shuttered pretty quickly (Apple Store is still there, of course).
Plus, IIRC their return policy on what they had in stock was worse than other PC retailers
The people I worked with REALLY tried and cared to deliver what the bigger MS office asked for, but the distributed nature of the organization combined with a lack of unifying vision made delivering something great almost impossible.
Even with dedication, the result would be half-baked Wizards and ASP "solutions" that met the punch list requirements
That's not entirely true. Microsoft is not just the Office and Windows 11 monolith of trash, but is made o dozens or even hundreds of small teams and silos, some making cool shit even though not all of them survived their niches or kept their quality.
>Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist.
Encarta, Visual Studio, the OG Xbox and 360, windows Phone 10, Zune, Surface Studio, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, AutoRoute, IntelliMice, trackballs and ergonomic keyboards, Kinect camera systems, Spot Watches, Hololens.
Their stock doesn't stuck. Latest figures show MSFT has a $3.69 Trillion market cap, while apple is sitting at $3.00 Trillion.
You're living in a bubble where you think "nobody uses Microsoft."
That's the root cause of why the stores failed.
Think about it: how many people openly say that they love to use Apple products vs people who openly say they love Microsoft products?
I have never ever heard anybody say/write about a great Microsoft product.
I write all of this as someone who uses Windows, Teams and other Microsoft crap every day all day.
Especially, but not limited to, support.
Gamers use Windows because (until recently, and even still only in specific contexts) you need Windows to game properly. Thankfully between things like the Proton framework and broader support for Mac and Linux gaming, that's starting to change.
People in business and government use Windows because Apple has never prioritized the Enterprise environment in MacOS, and it shows. And to be honest thank fuck, otherwise MacOS might be as bad as Windows is now.
A whole lot of regular people use Windows at home, because it's just the default and you can get PC's for dirt cheap (pre-tariffs anyway) that come preinstalled with it. However that market is eroding as people go full time on smartphones for general computing and computers become less relevant overall.
I'm not saying Windows is going away, the inertia is incredible there and I suspect they'll continue trotting along, being mediocre and pissing off everyone continuously because that's really what they've always done. But let us not pretend financial success in the market is in any way an indicator of a good product. Like evolution, markets do not select for "the best" they select for "the okayest" and Windows is very much the okayest OS.
I find the user experience with Microsoft products to be bad. They continually have inconsistencies with their shortcut key bindings. Example would be Ctrl+F, find something but in Outlook it forwards and email. Visual Studio has numerous bad user experiences that they choose not to fix. Example is you cannot stash individual files in GIT, it is all or nothing. Only way around is GIT via terminal environment. It is 2025 and Visual Studio still cannot display source code in Vertical and Horizontal at the same time, one or the other. VSCode has had this feature forever. You have to pay me to use Microsoft software.
I don't need to use spreadsheets so Excel has no value to me. If a spreadsheet is needed, it is the most basic and LibreOffice works just fine. Only reason I use Outlook is because of IT. I don't even use Word and use MarkDown with PDF generators, plain text, or LaTex for documentation.
Microsoft had to universally disable Registry backups via a Windows 10 Update because they sold Surface laptops with low storage. Registry backups where filling up the hard-drive. These are the ones trying to compete against Google's Chromebooks.
WINE / Proton is displacing Windows in the PC gaming market. It actually gives users a better experience in some instances. Example would be that shaders can be compiled without running the game. Windows Direct X implementation will only compile shaders while the game is running. This will lower the FPS and has known to cause stuttering during first play through.
I will never install Windows OS on any of my computers ever again. The OS keeps getting worse and worse with newer versions. I've reached a point where if I need Windows OS the game / software is not desired and no money will change hands. I also will no longer buy a desktop or laptop that forces Windows to be purchased too. If there is ever a reason I need Window it will be installed as a VM.
The only application from Microsoft I will most likely use is VSCode and I'm trying to replace it with Zed and other tooling.
There is no argument people don't use Microsoft. The argument is the products coming out of Microsoft are low quality. Still waiting on Azure's feature to delete a GIT pull request in case sensitive information was accidentally pushed to the repository [0]. Microsoft truly does not respect the end user. You can see this with their forced bloat-ware such as Cortana, XBox features, and Recall, and user request never ending request to remove these useless / unused features.
Don't worry, their stock will go up as they push more advertisements onto the desktop for Home users. Investors love such trash.
[0] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Allow-deletion...
Oh man, that would have really set me off. What's the point of customer demos if the employees are going to ruin them?
I, uniquely it seems, had a great experience with a Microsoft store. And it almost made me buy a surface studio, but a decade later, I've admittedly only ever upgraded my MacBooks...
When I first went to the new Microsoft store near by university, I really wanted to try the Studios (I was an art minor; it seemed amazing to draw on). I ended up sitting there in the mall drawing on it for a few hours while my friends shopped. I apparently attracted a crowd, and the local employees called corporate to tell them. They asked for my number and I ended up getting a call from a Microsoft marketing employee asking to talk to me because they wanted to turn this "spontaneous mall moment" into a TV ad. I don't think an ad ever aired though.
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".
The conversation literally would have been "can I help you?" "Yes I want a space grey m3 macbook air, 16gb ram 512gb ssd, I will pay for it right now and then leave this terrible place tyvm". With the laptop on-hand the purchasing process would've taken as little time as it took for them to ram it into pos and for my phone nfc to pay.
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.
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.
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.
Recently i've bought the new iphone, it's not as expensive as the high end macbook, but still, not a small amount of money.
I got to the store, asked for the phone, finalized my purchase and got out, all in 15 min i guess. No second guess, no cold feet, because i had been researching smartphones for years before going with it, i knew what i would get and what i wouldn't.
Back in the day you would indeed need to go to the store to know what you were getting.
Same for Android, I wouldn’t buy one without testing before, for example.
Also: The Microsoft and Chromebook displays at electronics chain-stores have seriously stepped up their game in the last 10 years or so. Before that it was a shitshow, with keyboards missing keys and the OS crashing on demo devices that would be otherwise perfectly usable machines.
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.
Works reasonably well. When I worked retail we had a person whose MO was to come into the store, browse the expensive headphones, take one off the shelf and put it down on the floor with their book bag while they looked at something else. After about 10 or 15 minutes they’d pick up the book bag and sweep the headphones inside as they were standing up and then walk out the door. If you stopped by while they were looking at the other thing and asked them if they needed any help with finding some accessories for the headphones or just offering to “hold it at the register” for them, they would wind up putting them back (or handing them to you and tell you they changed their mind) and leaving.
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.
I also think the iPad isn't terrible, although it's a bit on the expensive side.
We once had a guest lecturer who broke down the ROI of making the ladies bathrooms beautiful (but not the men's). Presumably it leads to more alcohol consumption, which is where the margins are. I think restaurants in the UK make almost no money on the food itself.
In some places, the drink is the loss leader. A group of people head out to a place and pay the minimum - a $0.50 cup of tea. One of them will buy a basket of snacks for the group. Someone in that group might order the food. A plate of noodles or naan is nearly free in terms of ingredient costs.
Sometimes it's the atmosphere. I'm not sure if other countries have this, but there might be a major game on TV - football, wrestling, etc. Not everyone can afford to watch it at home, so everyone goes to a cheap restaurant. Sometimes the people who do have it at home just go to hear the cheers.
Clubs would give us £10 per girl we brought in, but much more importantly (to us) give us a table bang in the VIP section and a few free bottles. We would aim to bring 10-20 girls with us.
The girls would go and mingle with other tables in the VIP area who were often men who'd paid through the nose for a VIP table (£1,000 a bottle for alcohol that generally cost less than £50 wholesale, and this was in the early 2000s), because generally they knew they were rich guys and they had free alcohol on their tables.
At several set points, the club would send our table bottles of alcohol with fireworks and make a big deal out of it, and all the girls would migrate back to our table for the drinks and high-fives, which would encourage the men with the actual money to then order their own bottles in the hope of luring the girls back.
The girls were (frequently American) university students who got a free night out hosted by people they trusted, in a venue with bouncers they came to know well, we got the immense social proof of being the people at the center of the VIP section surrounded by girls which helped our own love lives no end, the club spent a few hundred bucks on us but filled their VIP area with pretty girls, and finally the bankers who'd paid a huge amount for their VIP table got pretty young American university students to talk to.
I'm sure this is still a popular model, and we were very far from the only people doing it.
(I have no idea how much a drink costs in the US so I’m using my local prices and currency for overpriced drinks)
I wonder: what roles are they being hired for? How does Apple ensure they never talk about their work?
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.
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
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.
I started with a 32 MB Diamond Rio PMP300, so cramped as I transcoded music to 64kbps just to cram an hour in there, but the ability to listen to music without it _ever_ skipping (I was MTBing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter) was invaluable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300
And then upgraded to a 64MB Rio 600
https://tweakers.net/ext/i/964783073.jpg
After that it was straight up to a 4GB black iPod Nano gen 1 that I rocked for a loooooong time as it was insanely hardened and durable.
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 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.
My first mp3 player was a 20GB archos xs202, which I loved. Partly for being a great music player, partly for being a generic 20GB external drive when needed. I think at one point I had it set up both as a music player and to boot debian on a host PC when connected via USB...
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!
I eventually did get an iPod, the one that was all capacitive touch buttons and wheel, the last one before the click wheel.
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.
- 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!
I have never seen a nomad and I know that line. The nomad was famous for it as far as I am concerned.
Apple Store employees are definitely trained better than the average shop, but they are far from luxury.
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.
If you don't look like their typical customers (age, clothes, etc), you'll be mistreated or even sometimes kicked out as soon as you step in the store.
Plus it's just good practice. Your job as a salesperson in a high-end store is to educate and inform, not to sell. With that level of clientele they're looking to buy - if not now then later.
The only people who should be profiling customers are LPOs.
You know, like our parents and grandparents would have done at a store. With humans who shouldn't be beckoned by glaring while standing near a display.
It's sometimes difficult to find someone to let you buy something, even.
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.
