elfs | Big Unboxing (Reply)

Unboxing

Omaha and I went down to the Grand Re-Opening of the new, enlarged Apple Store at Southcenter Mall in Tukwila. There's a very geeky tradition among Apple afficionadios to photograph new hardware as you take it out of the box; this is called "unboxing," and I told Omaha that we should go to the "biggest unboxing there is," especially since the Apple store has had a big, black box around it for the past three weeks.

It turned out that they were giving away free t-shirts to the first 500 people who came through the door, as well as insane cheering that reminded me too much of the way parenting book recommend you over-enthuse over your child's successes in order to get them to repeat.

The line at the store was pretty long, but not 500 people. I went to get a coffee from Starbucks, and had the same odd experience I've had at other times at that particular coffee shop: I was the only man in there.

Kid's Station

I went back to the Apple Store and apparently they weren't out of t-shirts yet because they handed me one as I walked through. Along with the excessive clapping and cheering.

The store is less flourescent than its previous incarnation, more user-friendly. I was especially touched with the "Just for Kids" section, a kid-low table with two Macs running kid-friendly games, so that the parents could shop in quiet and the kids could come up with a long list of "buy-me-thats."

Apple is much more serious than other retailers about selling backup solutions (and bless Apple for making that a priority), so there have alway been portable hard-drives for sale at Apple stores. But they were also selling printers, which was new.

Their software rack wasn't any bigger than it had been the last time I looked. Omaha and I looked around, but we left empty-handed.