Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Online Store Goes Down Ahead of 'Time Flies' Virtual Event
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Might get those, although the M3 version of the Sony has performed well up to now, and my wife is happy with the B&W PX7. Depends a bit on what they promise to do better than the competition...
H.
Yup. I've worked at Apple in the Online Store engineering group. And the secrecy is even worse than that. We didn't know for sure what was being announced, until the rest of the world did. Until we watched the event live. Which was a very big deal for the whole company. It was very cool and exciting for us at Apple too. Everyone gathers together all over Apple, in large theaters and cafeterias and meeting rooms, where we all watch the events live. The huge cafeterias that are all over the place, are called Caffè Macs (and yes spelled with 2 Fs and the accented E), have big screens that lower out of the ceiling and movie thearter scale projectors. There are often several of these in the bigger Caffè Macs, so the whole area can see a screen.
BTW - Fun Fact: Apple has included the internally used names for their offices and the Caffè Macs in Apple Maps, since it's launch. You just have to search Apple Maps or zoom into their location to see them, if you know where they are. For example, search for "Caffè Macs" in California or Austin TX. Or search for AP01 to get Apple Park (the new HQ) or IL01-IL06 (IL1-6 works too) to find Infinite Loop's buildings (the old HQ), etc. etc. By now there are probably over 200 Apple buildings, most of them in the San Francisco Bay area. A few years ago there were like over 160 buildings just in the SF bay area.
I just wrote a reply about the online store going down. Here's part of it.
What about people who ordered 4 hours before?
You are always going to have to have a cutoff. Also plenty of time to cancel the order or within the return window.
I think this will be more about the services the new watches offer more than the watch itself. One step closer to Apple becoming a bigger player in the health space. Unless making money off of diabetics excites you be prepared to be disappointed.
I think they only do it to create hype.
Not everyone is aware of the event, but if you open the store today by change you're going to find out there are new products coming and will return later to know more.
Sound and touch gestures are great! but switching between my MBP and iPhone was not a smooth experience which is annoying. Want to switch to my MBP for online meetings and then back to my phone for music.
No benefits, NO !!! Some people will argue that there is a marketing benefit because news stories like this get published. But does anyone really think that Apple has any difficulty getting people to talk about them and their products ? LMFAO, Nooo-hooo-hoooo-hooooo !!!
And regular folks don't know, nor care, about the online store going down for a bit. Unless they try to buy something when it's down, and then maybe the worst thing that happens is they say "What the hell ?" to themselves and then just come back later. It's not like Apple's hurtin' for business.
My observations when I was working there, were that they just would not spend the time to replace, reengineer, or refactor stuff. And it was not for lack of money - of course - they've got a ton of money - they practically print money. There was just so much happening, so fast, that attention went to the next big thing.
Ironically, the old tech debt causes them to burn through a bunch of money, and still to this day requires Apple to shutdown the entire online store for hours to deploy code and content to several gigantic data centers with 1,000s of servers in them. I never got the sense that most people even recognized that it was a problem.
Can you imagine Amazon or Google shutting down to roll out a new product or feature ? That would be totally bananas right ? But that thought didn't seem to cross most people's minds at Apple. Or their attention was just drawn to the next big thing.
It's part of Apple's culture to do the shutdown for major product introductions. People would be disappointed if they didn't do it. And it absolutely goes to notoriety.
Before Coronavirus, I used to visit my local Apple Store all the time.
I agree. The hardware tech was very impressive. And most of the software is very impressive. And the gi-normous scale of what the online store can do and handle it in real time is bananas, and not many companies can do what Apple does with that scale. It's the deployments and engineering automation with the online store that's a problem, that results in this long downtime.Although you'd be closer on some of the infrastructure in place for the online store, the optical networking stuff that went into Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore was very impressive. High end and very specialised stuff, I found myself in my front room in England at 2am local time, quite enjoying a conference call between the States and Singapore whilst they commissioned some kit. Most of it went completely over my head, but what I did understand was darned impressive!!
LOL !!! 😆 Yup, you're right. I thought about that, but repeated it in case the reader only saw 1 reply. I included it just so they knew that I knew what I was talking about, and wasn't just guessing.
Do you really think they do this because it’s necessary, or to build anticipation?
That, and also why not a sneak peek at the new iPhones? They don't have to release today, but they could manage our expectations a bit better.
Yeah, agreed, good modern software would make it easier. Apple is not that good at online and cloud stuff I guess. I hope they get the airtags right, it's a pure cloud service.
Yeah, it is tradition, but an accidental one. Not by design, which is very un-Applely of them. Apple is awesome at doing a lot of things on purpose, by design, even if no one realizes it. We obsessed over every little detail. Apple is known for that.
But this one, I'd have to put it in a category similar to a bug. By definition a bug is an accident. This one is a known defect, that has become a tradition simply because it has gone uncorrected for so long.
And I'm absolutely certain that lots of people inside and outside of Apple would complain if they fixed this defect. No question.
I made this analogy in another reply, but it also applies here. Can you imagine if Amazon shutdown their store when they launched a new product or feature ? Or if any online store did ?
People don't know, but apple official site is one of the most html5 heavy "site tech" but light for the device
And there are websites that are in tone with the tech, but heavy for the device, like the verge
When i hear those "hasn't improved their technology with their website over all these years" is clear that person is not a developer or something around that
I am interested, but only if it isn’t an inaccurate gimmick. We’ll see what else is coming, especially items that are Gen 6 dependent and won’t work on my Gen 4. Improved battery life is always welcome but I currently don’t have a lot of problems with my watch running out of power.
I love the people who claim nobody wants something but then its a hit with Apple.
Apple should have a live updating ticker/graphic that shows all the sales they make on pre-order. haha
Yeah, that's also in play in the Apple Online Store (AOS) group too. When I was there a few years ago, there were 100s of services, many many redundant ones that were copied from others and modified, and almost no documentation on them. It was frightening.
At that time a newer manager was trying to get the services at least cataloged so we could know what was in there, and then begin getting docs together. That was the first required step towards cleaning up tech debt. Someone reverse engineering a commonly used store page design and found that it made over 70 service calls to render that 1 product page. For example, an iPhone configuration page that a customer sees.
Years later, the store still goes down, and the hours it is down has been increasing. At this moment it's now going on 4 hours down. And today's event won't end for about another 3-4 hours, and typically the store comes back online after the event ends. So based on those results, or lack thereof - they are falling backwards - I'd bet green money that the documentation effort went nowhere.