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In the minds of the corporate workers that came up with the Apple Store Brand Story, every Apple Store employee is your best friend and will jump at the opportunity to assist you, Apple's most loyal customer, with anything you need. So of course they're not going to make you wait in line like the PC Guy from those ads from 10 years ago would; they will be waiting for you when you walk in, just like Hachikō waited each night for his owner at Shibuya station. For nine years after he died.

Over in the real world, the employees have spent 10 hours of their 12 hour shift explaining to the world's least-technically-adept people how to activate their Verizon service with 4 prepaid debit cards and a ripped $20 bill. Sixty times. While being yelled at. So... they might accidentally not notice you if you just come in and don't aggressively try to attract their attention. I do not blame them.

>ripped $20 bill

This is a hilarious problem to anyone who has been using polymer bills for nearly a decade.

Um, polymer bills rip too.

only if they're cut. In practice I can tell you how many ripped bills I've dealt with since we've had them. 0.

I can only think of one ripped dollar i've ever had and it's because i happen to have it in my wallet right now.

The plastic money introduced in the UK can rip.

Once it has a small tear, it very easily tears the rest of the way.

Once it is folded it never goes flat again.

They also feel really cheap.

> They also feel really cheap.

I thought that at first.

Now the old ones feel really cheap to me. I guess you just get used to it

Don't forget the dreaded crease that causes it to not be accepted by vending machines, supermarket self-serves, etc.

Just use cards. They don't tear.

-Scandinavia

I keep my credit card in the back pocket of my trousers (like I would keep cash). I need to reorder the card every 3-12 months from the bank, as the chip breaks from sitting on it.

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/realtime/

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/wikileaks-visa-blockade/

Blanket, universal surveillance as well as zero-burden-of-proof government point-and-click seizure/disablement is the cost.

You cannot have a free society without a payment system that the government or a few large banks do not have the ability to arbitrarily censor, even temporarily.

You can not communicate or organize anonymously (for example, for political organization or government corruption investigative journalism) when every payment you need to do so is logged as a matter of course. These activities are not common, but essential to a free society.

The ability to transact in things the government does not like, without their knowing about it, is a cornerstone of freedom. Many other human rights crumble if you do not preserve it.

Hyperbole. People will trade freely if they need to. Cash is not what prevents tyrants from coming to power, democratic societal structures do. Elections do. Having an educated population does. Cash didn’t save anyone from tyrannical rule.

Lack of cash usage or ability to transact with it has absolutely curtailed people's freedom, though. Privacy is a human right! There is virtually zero electronic financial privacy in the global west today. Everything is surveillance-by-default.

Perhaps they should keep a few staff in reserve as the equivalent of "tier-2 technical support", such that those people never deal with the mundane stuff, and so never get driven to distraction by the inanity of it.

Oh, wait, that's the Apple Store Business team, isn't it?

They used to do that. In the Apple Store video Steve put together, he explained that the geniuses would be well trained Mac technicians that could fix most anything, and when they couldn’t, there was a phone they could pick up to talk to a engineer at HQ.

Now, due to cost (although price has gone up for the stuff), the Geniuses are no longer trained at HQ, and there are now lower level “technicians” that can’t do much more than give you a new phone.

There are now close to 1 billion iPhone users around the world. With only 506 Apple Stores, and over half of those Stores are in US.

After Angela left Apple, the first thing they did were "revert" all the thing changes back to Steve Jobs era.

Basically Apple Retail has been a pile of mess since Steve passed away, not keeping up with the huge iPhone growth, and none of the Retail SVP had any idea what is best for Apple Store.

> Furthermore I don’t want to risk some rogue employee’s goons taking it to the next level by physically attacking me and robbing me on the way to my car.

I don't think this is the right mindset—theft from your own employer is a white-collar crime. The type of people who would even be morally okay with stealing iMacs out of people's hands wouldn't be bothering to work for the store in the first place; they'd be bribing security to get in and then shuttling boxes into a van. Or holding up a delivery truck full of iMacs.

Also, getting a job specifically to steal from your employer is a pretty long-term strategy; it doesn't pay off if you only do it a couple of times. If you're doing this, you're probably doing it because you have a specific play that allows you to do it over and over without increasing the compound probability of getting caught—i.e. one that doesn't really generate any evidence personally implicating you (like the testimony of hired goons when later caught by the police), only equivocal evidence (like the fact that the person who came in to buy an iMac is a friend of the employee.) Really, generating negative utility for any individual (rather than just a corporation) in your theft, is a pretty surefire way to have someone (e.g. that same individual) take a look into what's going on.

> If you're doing this, you're probably doing it because you have a specific play that allows you to do it over and over without increasing the compound probability of getting caught—

No, most people who do it are just irrational.

If you were doing it rationally, sure, that would pretty nearly require what you say to be true, but assuming that everyone acts rationally is...inaccurate.

Most crimes have a pretty poor return on investment. That's why criminals tend to be poor.

For example, the people around criminals tend to know they are criminals (and criminals often brag about begin criminals). People don't trust criminals and don't want to do business with them - leaving the criminal with fewer legitimate options for making money.

You've got that backwards.

Most criminals are poor because poverty drives people to crime.

Most people treated as criminals are poor because of the shape of wealth distribution, plus the fact that wealth is associated with the ability to have your behavior not treated as criminal when the same behavior from a poorer person would be treated as criminal.

Criminals tend to be poor because the types of things defined as crimes have poor risk reward profiles and only make sense if you’re poor. Fraudulently advertising OxyContin and causing a drug epidemic that kills half a million people doesn’t make you a criminal, it makes you a philanthropist — you have to pistol-whip a clerk at a liquor store to become a criminal.

Jesus, my guy. I “blame” commenters like yourself on HN for my exceptionally pessimistic and skeptical outlook on life and systems (and society)... but goddamn you have a point.

(PS: sorry about using “Jesus” and “guy” - it’s meant purely as an idiom - I’m not making assumptions)

Or perhaps an incompetent employee really just gave it to the wrong customer? Maybe they were tired and distracted after a long day at their insufferable retail job? Maybe someone forgot to put your identifying sticker on the box?

Seems unlikely that hussle pulled on you would work more than once, ever.

I've worked at jobs where this same exact scam was done for three orders of magnitude less profit, this seems totally reasonable.

and i've worked at computer big box stores and incompetent staff just fucked up accidentally. not saying either way here but it's certainly within the realm of possibility that it's a messup.

Of course you were going to buy a $50k computer to a luxury brand but can't find bodyguards.

Which maybe it is even the case; and in that case you probably should think hard about if you are not slowly drifting away from the reality as experienced by the vast majority of other people.

Yep, Apple probably does not care much about your profile as a prospect.

Tim already has you covered, it's called shipping with required signature. They can deliver to your home or work.

So you're saying "he's ordering it wrong"?

I see what you did there.

in all seriousness though, yes? if you have to wait for the item to be shipped regardless, why would you order it to a store instead of your front door? it's the worst of both worlds.

The trustworthiness of last-mile delivery could have something to do with it.

Amusingly enough I've had that method fail while ordering an iMac a few years ago.

I requested delivery-with-signature on a $4k iMac and it got delivered to another house three blocks away. They didn't ask for the signature (though they were supposed to); they just left a $4k computer on the curb. It was marked as delivered. I'm lucky to have an honest neighbor who brought it to my doorstep (no thanks to Apple and their logistics partners).

Apple's lucky that you have an honest neighbour. The computer wasn't your responsibility since you never signed for it.

That's the couriers problem then. If a signature was required for a $4k item it's contingent on them to get it into the receiver's hands. Your neighbor saved you and the courier a great deal of money. Apple would have filed a claim and sent you another $4k iMac that UPS/Fedex/DHL would be paying for.

From a liability perspective you’re probably right. I just mean it’s Apple that picks the courier, and that that solution to delivery can fail in basically the same way as store pickup (as happened to me).

They can get away with this because they're essentially a cash machine. As long as people keep buying their products and putting up with bad experiences, this will continue. Why spend money on improving customer experience when you have record sales?

You could have bought your machine via craigslist next day for a nice discount then cancelled the order.

Which would not raise any red flags at all, while also not painting a target on you marked "cui prodest".

Ship it to your office, private mail box, or home?

His fault for ordering it to the store -- and expecting it to be no problem to pick it up there?

If you have it shipped you're not responsible for it until you sign for it.

If you’re going to spend $50,000 on a computer, you can probably hire two security guards / off duty cops for an hour each at $250 an hour?

The whole notion of employing off duty police as security is antithetical to the proper administration of justice and highlights systematic malaise.

As well as the fear of robbery for such a low value and traceable item.

Edit because I can't reply:

Just off duty police. Police have significant powers, even off duty. In addition, if you pay them well they might do favors for you when on duty. Like looking for someone in the police databases, telling you about police operations etc.

There are many security guards who are not people who failed to become police. Some are ex police, ex Army etc, but there are limited situations when an armed response is rational, and a $50k Mac is not one of them. An insurance policy is much cheaper.

Having said that, I recommend Samoans (wide) and Sudanese (tall) for unarmed intimidation potential.

Do you oppose security guards in general, or only off-duty police officers working as security guards? I ask because as far as I can tell the practical alternative is to hire some guy who flunked out of the police academy and became a security guard instead, which seems... worse.

Personally I navigate life without hiring any security guards. But I recognize that some people and/or circumstances might have legitimate need for one.

I think the beef is with the idea that police have a trusted role in society, that is incompatible with being "goons for hire"

I’d just open carry my .45 into the Apple store. Probably wouldn’t go over well with the typical Apple crowd, but guarantee you won’t be robbed.

I did that once with a Glock 20. I didn't care if went over well; no way I'm gonna receive a large corporate order and move it to the parking lot at night any other way. No way to tell who had access to the order info in their system, though I will say I'd trust Apple on privacy far more than I would most other hardware companies.

I wouldn’t call $50k a “low value” item. What item does the average person own that’s worth $50k besides a house or a car?

Watches, jewellery etc.

Low value is relative. $50k is a lot to many people, but compared to human life, $50k isn't worth the risk.

Average person though, no? Im not sure even half the people in the 97th percentile having one watch or piece of jewelry worth $50K.

Depending on where you live and what you prioritize. Among the people I know, very few own their apartment or use a car. And a $50k car is not the cheapest either... In the US it might be an average, but here in Europe where the public transportation works well you have to be making a lot of money to have a $50k car be worth it in the city. In my case, it could then be argued that the average person doesn't own a car or a house either.

Many families have watches or jewellery that gets passed down the family tree. A $50k watch or a piece of jewellery is something that lasts for many generations. Most people who own a watch of in that price point never paid for it, but got it as a gift. Also, timepieces of that value often rise up in value.

Anyway, it's beside the point. Whether the average person owns what doesn't affect what $50k is relative to a human life.

Watches are basically obsolete today. I expect them to gradually drop in value over the next 50 years as older generations die off. Especially mid-tier ones. Top of the top will maintain value because of demand from eccentrics and low-tier ones don't have much value in the first place.

Watches definitely aren't obsolete. Just go look how many people on the street are wearing watches.

Well-made watches from known brands with a heritage keep their prices very well, even during economically difficult times. If you look at a mid-level luxury brand such as Rolex, you can invest $8000 for a watch that has a great track record in keeping its value: https://imgur.com/0XeTVg5 And that's not even a top-level brand. Rolex is considered mid-tier in terms of luxury watches and the Submariner is one of their lower priced models.

I find it hard to believe that you have some kind of special power to predict how such a stable market will suddenly experience a crash. Though I hope you're right, because I'd love to have access to great watches for a lower price.

> Just go look how many people on the street are wearing watches.

Uhhhmmm... Not many? And those who wear, it's either an apple watch or some cheap utilitarian model.

> I'd love to have access to great watches for a lower price.

Expensive watches require regular service to retain their value. Let's see how it will work when Rolex asks you for $1000 a piece for your briefcase full of watches.

I can see many owners of inherited watches being unwilling to pay up for servicing their watch. Which will prompt many of them to sell it, thus creating an increase in supply. At the same time demand for Rolex-type watches will be dropping, or at best remain stable. Thus, these watches will lose value.

Well, if you find a genuine Rolex at a rock-bottom price that needs servicing, make sure to let watch enthusiasts know, you'll make an easy buck flipping it.

Me? I've yet to find those deals.

> Uhhhmmm... Not many? And those who wear, it's either an apple watch or some cheap utilitarian model.

Are those not watches? You said watches are obsolete, and now you're discounting a big part of them. Apple watches, utilitarian watches are watches. Some people like them, others don't. I would never want an Apple watch, but I love my Swatch. No data tracked anywhere, no need to recharge, and looks and feels much nicer than an Apple watch for a fraction of the cost.

The point of most tools is their utility. Are you saying that in a watch, telling time is just a side effect?

I agree about the high end market always being there. Makers like MB&F are essentially making kinetic sculptures that you wear.

At the lower end of the market, Apple alone makes something like $35 billion on watches from nothing a decade ago.

Mid-tier makers like Rolex haven't been able to meet demand for a decade now.

I think a lot of the smaller manufacturers will go away. There's something like 500 watch companies in Switzerland alone and I'm guessing most of those don't have much of a future.

click the timestamp of a comment to always reply

>Are you listening, Tim? Probably not.

This is a question for Jeff Williams, COO at Apple. I am often surprised with the amount of 3rd parties that Apple interacts with and the lack of integration between each group. Apple is the company of seamless integration after all...

Had a similar but less dramatic experience happen this last December when I decided to trade in and purchase an iPhone 11. There was a dead pixel on the screen so I return + exchanged it, however Apple quoted me a different price after the exchange. No idea house this happened, but they still let it go through. What takes the cake is when the genius at the pickup line tried to give me two pairs of AirPods as I was leaving the store “you bought these right?” I had to respectfully decline the free AirPods and left wondering at the pre-Christmas chaos that was taking place.

My girlfriend's track pad was acting up. The Genius said it wasn't working because she had Google Chrome installed, and wasn't using Safari.

I'm not an Apple guy myself, but I lost a lot of respect for them as a company.

I know Marco Arment has talked about some kind of Apple representative who you can order through when you’re the kind of customer who is spending bank there. Maybe something to look into, I didn’t get the impression that it was the same thing as Apple business but this was years ago I heard, maybe things change. I feel like if you ask Apple may have some experience with dealing with security around the walking with a massive purchase thing.

Now I’m kinda wondering if you could build a nice “rich people buying shit logistics” lifestyle biz though.

You'd be surprised how unsophisticated it actually is for the rich. I have a friend who has this taxi driver guy go buy everything she needs out on the town and deliver it to her. Yes, a yellow cab driver. Groceries, clothing, a new laptop, whatever. He brings it and she pays him well.

That’s pretty wild. I wonder how those relationships develop and how sticky they are. C’mon, someone go halfsies with me on a Trunk Club spin on postmates et al

In her case, he took her to the airport once and she liked him, so she started always using him for rides there. Then she started having him run little errands for her and it just expanded from there. This is what taskrabbit looked like for the wealthy in 1992.

Friend of mine makes hourly what many people earn in a week ($1k hourly billable), so while they lived in LA it made sense to have someone drive them from the airport back home because what should take ~20 minutes at most usually took 2 hours.

During those two hours they could work, and thus make money, it didn't make sense to drive themselves.

Their company hired a particular car hire service and the drivers would get rotated through a schedule, but they ended up having a particularly good relationship with a particular driver.

So they dropped the contract with the company, and basically just paid the one driver himself, basically a personal chauffeur, but with a schedule that is known two weeks ahead of time, with some emergencies, but not 24/7.

Eventually this allowed said driver to buy a couple of cars, and start a company himself, while always making sure to take care of my family member first and foremost himself.

They trusted the driver with their children, and for certain purchases the driver would either go pick up items (such as jewelry/high end clothes) or their driver would drive a consultant (personal shopper) to go do the shopping/pickups.

My friend moved away from the LA area, but used the same driver for ~6 years or so, the driver now runs a high-end private car hire service that offers services to cater specifically to people that need services like that. No advertising, word of mouth only, and everyone involved is highly vetted and trusted.

It's pretty amazing how much time you get back when you can pay someone else to do the things that take time but don't really provide happiness in life. Such as cleaning/driving/cooking/household chores that the rest of us have to do ourselves, and thus is all billable time.

$1k/hour is reasonable billable rate for big law firm partners in a big city. Probably a bit cheap depending on speciality.

It’s the Apple Store business team and you absolutely should buy through them, especially for custom hardware because the discounts are significant for those items (not so much for iPhones and other consumer base models)

Out of curiosity, why would you go with a top-end Mac Pro instead of a server at that price point?

What server? The closest thing Apple sells is the rack mount mac pro. (I'm assuming it needs to run Mac OS for application compatibility)

Can you get it delivered directly to your home/business? Might be a solution.

and get it tossed out of the UPS truck as it does a slow drive-by your address.

The irony here being that UPS / Fedex ship to the stores.

Anything worth over $500 is going to automatically require a signature on delivery, so little chance it’ll just get tossed off the truck.

Hah. About half the Signature Required deliveries I've received from Apple (and Dell, to be fair) at my home... haven't.

You need to ask them to ship it as “adult signature required” I’ve never been able to get out of it when they need an adult to sign.

Ups will leave a brand new MacBook Pro on your front lawn at 8 at night

When my MacBook was delivered, FedEx gave me a call when they found I wasn’t at home and asked if I would prefer they drop by my office instead. I told her I was already on my way home, and she said she’d stop by again in about 30 minutes.

They probably get paid on commission for walk-in sales.

I’ve seen other stores appropriate internet orders to make a sale. From the salespersons perspective they don’t have much to lose.

Apple retail employees aren’t paid on commission AFAIK. Flat rate whether you buy an iPad or a $15k Mac Pro. The theory was to avoid the “grandma got talked into a multi thousand dollar computer and a billion accessories she didn’t need because that’s how the employee gets the most money.

Yeah I got jipped at AT&T with a bunch of add-ons which were not explained and ended up with like three lines. Flat rates are the way to go but something has to be done about issues like employees conspiring.

"was recently interested in buying a maxed out Mac Pro for 50k+.."

Wow what do you do that requires a $50k computer?

Why are you ordering this to the store and not to your home?

Not OP, but I usually order items to the nearest store not my home - I can't control when something is delievered to my home, and if I miss the delivery I have to go to the nearest depot which is a massive pain in the back. Instead I can get most things delivered to a store nearby and just pick them up on my way back from work.

A maxed out computer is a perishable good - it's not going to be maxed out for long - and when it isn't the price falls rapidly. Did you get compensated for one month's depreciation?

The fact that there seems to have been no compensation is evidence to me that this was an intentional scam by the employee and they're doing what they can not to call attention to it. In my experience Apple is extremely generous with compensating for errors like this. For example, when I sent my MBP 2016 in for a keyboard repair, they decided to take that opportunity to upgrade the SSD from 256GB to 1TB. This is just one example of many. I used to do technical support for Apple in the beginning of my tech career and they gave us a huge budget to throw money at people.

How does q corporations unwillingness to spend money connect with the idea that it’s a scam? I mean, it could be a scam.. but how does this specific piece of evidence connect?

It sounds more like a piece of unrelated information that you are leveraging to support the story you told yourself.

The premise is that Apple is very generous with apology compensation / gifts, even outside of repairs. An agent doing so over a certain $ amount draws additional attention to the individual from the business. These coupled with the fact that they received no compensation or gift indicates a number of things, among which is that they chose not to gift anything to minimize attention brought to themselves. I'm just hypothesizing. Regardless, they clearly need to be retrained.

The upgrading stuff in computer when it’s sent in is not uncommon though.

Corporate would love to hear this story.

>Furthermore I don’t want to risk some rogue employee’s goons taking it to the next level by physically attacking me and robbing me on the way to my car.

I laughed. This is why customer interaction is often kept minimal, rediculous concerns like this.

If you need a bodyguard when you buy a new computer, perhaps it's a sign that you are spending a bit too much money on it.

What's the alternative? For the right professions, compute is time is money (software builds, video encoding, 3D rendering, etc.), and not all of them distribute nicely (I've never even seen distcc actually used).

The alternative is to spend less, to share resources between employees, or to rent. You can rent a much more powerful rendering farm in the cloud for less money than a full option Mac pro. Video encoding can be done in good quality and good time on a 200€ smartphone. If you push the settings to the max, you still don't need a 50k€ computer... And for software builds, just take a coffee break whenever you feel like rebuilding everything on your local machine. The company should have build servers too.