Apple Store 2.0
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
Saw a guy watching soccer, another checking convocation dates, other checking horoscope. Apple stores are becoming the free internet cafe. It doesn't matter that no-one is buying, as long as they are using a Mac.
And, sadly, I wasn't able to check exactly what I wanted to check, the resolution on a Macbook Air 13".
“One metric used to measure the financials of a retail store is sales per square foot, which is the average revenue generated for every square foot of sales space. This metric is used to gauge the efficiency of a retail operation; the higher the sales per square foot, the better. Jeweler Tiffany & Company's $2700 per square foot used to be considered the gold standard, but Apple has surpassed Tiffany, generating more than $4000 in sales per square foot. By comparison, Best Buy's sales per square foot is about $1000, and Walmart's is about $400.” (http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=572252E1-1A64-6A71-CE7880C0...)
People are most certainly buying.
[1] "Oh, wow, I wanna take this too!"
illustrates just how ugly and annoying those wires are. Perhaps we'll eventually see wire-free ipads. OTA syncing as an option, for a start, and perhaps Apple will be the company to bring us wireless electricity. Just like with many other products and services, Apple's not the first to tackle something, but they refine it to such a degree that it's usable for the masses.
2. You can cram a lot more information into an interactive screen than you can on a single side of paper -- the shop displays will be fundamentally more useful and informative.
3. Centrally controlled updates to pricing. Ability to request build-to-order options at the shop counter. Means less staff running around the store checking all the displays are in order.
4. When the iPads are out of date they can be sold off as refurbs. (They're embedded in plexiglass boxes so unlikely to get scratched up by customers.)
5. Power consumption of an iPad is dwarfed by the power consumption of the lighting and aircon/heating for that amount of floor space in a premium store.
6. These are probably minimum-spec 16Gb wifi-only iPads. (They're in a store, with guaranteed bandwidth and presumably a central server behind the magic curtain. They don't need to store stacks of movies and tutorials directly.)
7. Anyway, since when has "environmentally friendly" been a primary operational criterion for any high-end retailer? Apple aren't in the business of minimizing resource extraction, they're in the business of maximizing profits. Obviously, they think whizzy animated interactive store displays will help them do so. Saving trees is way down their list ...