I checked out the new Apple store at Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island yesterday. This is one of the biggest malls in the country and is really nice and pretty upscale, even though someone was shot there a few weeks ago. Anyway, the Apple store opened recently so I popped in to see what I could see. This is the first Apple retail store I've been in and it was pretty cool, although probably smaller than some of the other locations. The outer walls are black and have a big glowing Apple logo. They look like the lid on a Pismo Powerbook. Beyond the sharp looks and store design I was pretty disappointed with the whole experience. The staff didn't seem very competent in answering some of my most basic questions and most of them seemed afraid to talk to people. If you are shy, you should not be working in retail. I asked one of the staffers if there was any news on a possible upgrade price option for 10.2. By the look on his face, it appeared he hadn't heard that Apple just announced a huge new OS update. After disappearing to the Genius Bar briefly, he came back with a confident "no". No? No what? Thanks for the help. I asked another staff member who looked a bit older than the teenager I just dealt with if he had any idea when Logic Audio for OSX would be released. He didn't know what Logic Audio was so I explained that Apple recently bought a company called eMagic and blah blah blah. To the Genius Bar he went. The answer that he came back with almost made me pass out. He said "It will be atleast a year before they do anything with that". He followed up with something about Cinema Tools but I was too shocked to listen. I went to the Genius Bar myself to interrogate this harbinger of bad news. He protested that it would indeed be atleast a year before we saw a sign of this product. Okay first of all "Genius", Logic for OSX was already deep into beta testing long before the Apple aquisition. And secondly, why would Apple buy a company and cut off 35% of it's user base(Windows folks) and then sit on it for a year!? They could be making money that whole year with Windows sales. This was no genius. This dude was uninformed to say the least. Logic was near completion before Apple bought them up. The delay for most major audio apps is supposedly 10.2 with it's Core Audio completion. I asked a handful of other questions about Apple hardware and all were answered with half-assed answers that were either half-right or all-wrong. Moving on...the store had two 17" iMacs on display and I can't help but wonder why these were even released. They look retarded and seemed really slow. Here's a tip Apple retail stores: Install pro graphics and video apps on the PowerMacs because it makes people leave when they watch the iMac choke to death on a Photoshop document. They had the entire Apple product line, except the XServe, proudly on display and in full working order which is refreshing if you've ever been to Circuit City where the employees spend their lunchbreaks pulling the keys off the iBooks. Before I go off on another tangent I'll just end by saying the store was visually nice, the staff sucked, and there was a surprisingly small amount of software in the place. I'm going to stop by the Soho store on my way home from work tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a better experience. I'm thinking it will because it's Manhattan and therefore the competition for employment was alot more fierce. We'll see. So far, IMHO no retail Apple specialist can beat Tekserve in NYC. They are the bee's knees! And they had the coolest booth at MWNY.
