Touching the back wall of the Apple store

Posted by nivethan 6/27/2025

Touching the back wall of the Apple store(blog.lauramichet.com)

253 points | 226 commentspage 2

laidoffamazon 6/30/2025|

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.

leakycap 6/30/2025||

> 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 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025||

I think that's totally accurate, actually.

laidoffamazon 6/30/2025|||

if TikTok is any indication it is the typical life of a Google engineer

Ashkee 7/5/2025||

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.

dusted 7/3/2025||

> 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.

janeway 6/30/2025||

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.

bigyabai 6/27/2025||

> 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 6/30/2025||

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.

rekenaut 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025||

> 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 6/30/2025||||

> 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 ] 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 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025|||

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.

microtherion 6/30/2025||

Rolex may have historically been a tool watch, but nowadays it seems more of a watch for tools.

thaumasiotes 6/30/2025|||

You don't think it's useful to know what time it is? Where does "Rolex is not high utility" come from?

jwagenet 6/30/2025|||

In the modern context, no. At least not from a watch. The parent offers a number of applications where timekeeping can be critical, but even when the Casio came out there were likely more functional alternatives to even the cheapest Rolex (a piece of jewelry).

keiferski 6/30/2025|||

That comment has a typical HN form: agree with the parent poster, but make an unnecessary, arbitrary new distinction so that you’re acceptably argumentative.

jojobas 6/30/2025|||

Nice, now please do you have anything to say about the $1000 monitor stand?

Gigachad 6/30/2025||||

I don’t believe there is any product that is functionally equivalent to the iPhone while being much cheaper.

All of the cheaper options make pretty significant trade offs. Ones that you might not care about, but that others do.

The same can’t be said for a Rolex where the much cheaper options are better in every way other than flexing.

tempestn 6/30/2025||

I feel like you're saying something like,"That expensive painting is inferior in every way to wallpaper, which covers the wall more effectively and durably, at a fraction of the cost."

The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of -more expensive materials -better finishing -superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)

The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)

astrange 6/30/2025|||

Apple products have intensely overengineered insides that are (single-digit) years ahead of the competition in performance and security. Giving them that high margins causes engineers to do enough work to keep up.

It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.

msgodel 6/30/2025|||

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.

rekenaut 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025||

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 6/30/2025|||

Almost none of those things have ads on the iPhone. All of them function reliably.

bacon_waffle 6/30/2025|||

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.

worthless-trash 6/30/2025|||

I mean, you're getting advertisements in your iWallet.. so...

Gigachad 6/30/2025||

I'm not as that was US only but yes that was outrageous and hopefully never happens again.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6/30/2025|||

> 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.)

msgodel 6/30/2025||

Firstly it's all very intentionally coupled together. There are strict rules around how the UI and notifications are used specifically so that they can sell your attention.

Secondly I think the only thing I really miss that's particular to smartphones is the map. Everything else is either a dumb gimmick or actually bad and all of it is to just get you're attention so they can sell it.

astrange 6/30/2025||

If you don't want notifications you can just turn them off.

zxexz 6/30/2025|||

I’m genuinely curious what your view on the unrealized potential is! I would love something new to hack on.

msgodel 6/30/2025||

It's a social problem not a technical one.

leakycap 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025||

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 6/30/2025||

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!

thaumasiotes 6/30/2025|||

> 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 6/30/2025||

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 6/30/2025||

What was the business adjacent to jewelry?

agos 7/13/2025||

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

gertlex 6/30/2025|||

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.

LeoPanthera 6/30/2025|||

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 6/30/2025||

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 6/30/2025||

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.

zxexz 6/30/2025|||

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)

carlosjobim 6/30/2025||

Are you arguing that luxury is in the cost of production, rather than the quality of the product?

OisinMoran 6/30/2025||

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!

natch 6/30/2025||

ArchOS MP3 player. Jukebox. Back before the big companies (Creative) discovered the concept.

https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B...

bArray 6/30/2025||

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.

leakycap 6/30/2025||

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."

Suppafly 7/5/2025||

>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.

anonu 6/30/2025|

Was it the rio mp3 player?

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.

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