The iCult stores. I had to detail a couple of dozen stores in the southeast when we starting selling them a product a few years back. It was interesting.
Corporately, they only deal directly with manufacturers that they do >$1M with. We had to deal through an ‘approved’ distributor.

It was bizarre talking to 20 year old product managers who knew absolutely nothing but Apple product. I developed a 1 minute iSpeech so that I could give them sales training on the floor, but in most cases I was talking to iClones who lived & breathed Apple & they had no mental storage capacity for a non-Apple product.

They have a store mockup in Cupertino where the merchandising team engineers the correct placement of every piece of gear on display. Once it is decided, the stores must follow the layout exactly – they could not even change a power cable’s placement. In our case, they decided that our product worked best on the Apple TV. But Cupertino reversed the channels, so the right speaker was on the left. Not one of the stores noticed the channel reverse & when I pointed it out, they were powerless to fix it. So all 200+ Apple stores had faulty displays.

We no longer sell Apple stores.

Ian

I see they got you also "an"...err I mean Ian :)

You are right, Keith. I should have signed the post . . .

iAn

The guy I work with went into the Apple store to pick up a new Apple TV. He said the place was packed. A customer service chick asked him if she could help. My co-worker said he wanted to buy a Apple TV. The chick walked to the shelf and picked it up, took out her iPhone and scanned the bar code, and swiped the credit card with a reader attached to the iPhone. She asked if he needed a paper receipt or if they could just email the receipt. He said email it. He was in and out in 3 minutes and never saw a cash register.

I don't go to the mall very often, and never at this time of year.

Apple will go to great lengths to keep up the image of being first. Another example is the iTouch. -i'm fairly certain that HTC had the HTC-Touch (similar product) long before Apple. Even the name "Apple." (lawsuits w/ Apple records.) And then there's hardware which they would like everyone to believe that they invented. (most recently i'm amazed by those who had never seen a tablet before)

So anyway, iYam (if you ask me) Popeye vastly predated Apple with "iYam what iYam." --but, iSuppose that Steve Jobs will also claim to be the first to Pop-i. :cool:

I did the same thing last week, was in and out in five minutes, that and internet are the only way to shop. I would have bought apple tv over the net but they will not ship the a PO Box.

What apple does is make ideas work in your hands. Not geek hands anyones.

Back when Apple was small you got chided for having the odd computer that could not run 4000 programs even when it could run the 6 you needed very well. Now that Apple is driving its own market you get chided for being one of the chanting collective.

I have/had 4 apple computers and all 4 just worked. Only the oldest one (a color classic) is off line. Old G4 newer G4 and laptop are all bug and problem free for many years.

Decided to get a ipod nano to go along with the early 2nd gen i pod I have that is still running. Walked into the apple store and a sales guy walked up to me and asked if I needed assistance. i told him what I was looking for and that I had some questions regarding having 2 ipods and 2 computers with i tunes running. He answered the questions correctly and I was out the door 5 min later having not waited in any line at all. No muss no fuss and setting up the ipod was seamless.

Laugh all you want. While you are mucking around with some balky printer driver i am jamming to tunes in the shop tinkering with my 911.

What time frame are you talking about?

In 1980, Apple OWNED the entire market. It had the most software, etc. They became PO'd that people were cloning their machines (Franklin) and they ended up going to a closed system. The MAC was the line on which this really started. They chose the educational market, not the business market. They didn't challenge IBM for many years.

Microsoft, say what you want, they were NEVER first with anything, but they always seemed to own the market later one...Where is word perfect, Lotus 123, Visacalc, etc, these days?

Apple is doing very well right now, but they are still very closed in the OS area.

I did the same, only the phone was for me. Big mistake. I could sit at my desk and use my Razr. With the iphone I have to be outside or at most a foot from a window to use the cell phone feature. The games are fun though.