I had a jaunt into Birmingham today and for the first time visited the Apple Store in the Bull Ring centre near Selfridges. For a while the Micro Anvika shop inside Selfridges had been the only way to get hands on with Apple’s latest kit. Nothing compares to the variety and layout of an Apple Store when it comes to Apple’s products though. No video iPods yet, but plenty of Nano’s, big screen iMacs and, my personal favourite, the Powerbooks. There are a high number of kids who hang out in the store which, to me, signifies that Apple have broken into demographics that were never part of their domain. Apple’s products are quite as exclusive and bespoke as Bang and Olufsen but they’ve always been on the higher end of the technology price bracket especially when compared to the same kind of appliance from other companies.
I must admit I do like the layout of the Apple Stores. The mix of Mac coupled with some kind of device - be it iPod, digital camera, piano keyboard gives a great reflection of this most multimedia of computers. And my favourite bit of all was that they’re all connected to the Internet too. Needless to say I left ‘istherefood.com’ loaded on their screens in Safari displaying Dan’s article about the video iPod. Some light reading for the staff in the store.