Touching the back wall of the Apple store

I was looking at a 17” PowerBook, salivating at the screen and performance but struggling with justifying the price tag. An incredibly nice lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. I told her I was thinking it over as it was a large purchase. She beamed and said “Of course, that’s totally understandable. In fact it takes on average 3 visits to an Apple Store before making a purchase”. It was the smartest, nicest, most low key way of saying don’t feel pressure…you’ll be coming back, and then you’ll buy the machine you’ve always wanted.

Very on brand. And surprisingly still not really copied by others.

Go outside of tech though and the Apple Store experience is commonplace. Apple itself copied the concept directly from high end fashion houses.

Recently i've bought the new iphone, it's not as expensive as the high end macbook, but still, not a small amount of money.

I got to the store, asked for the phone, finalized my purchase and got out, all in 15 min i guess. No second guess, no cold feet, because i had been researching smartphones for years before going with it, i knew what i would get and what i wouldn't.

Back in the day you would indeed need to go to the store to know what you were getting.

I went in to try the (then new) Surface Studio (the drafting table like AIO) and they couldn’t find the peripheral knob. But it kept triggering, but it turned out employees would mess around with customers by spinning it while they used it.

Of course that’s just one store, but I walked by several and they all just looked depressing inside. Layouts felt about as poorly planned as a Best Buy or staples display, and even things as simple as lighting was harsher.

It’s just not as simple as making a store. The store has to provide the right vibe, and Microsoft don’t understand vibe.

Plus, IIRC their return policy on what they had in stock was worse than other PC retailers

Same for Android, I wouldn’t buy one without testing before, for example.

Also: The Microsoft and Chromebook displays at electronics chain-stores have seriously stepped up their game in the last 10 years or so. Before that it was a shitshow, with keyboards missing keys and the OS crashing on demo devices that would be otherwise perfectly usable machines.

Anyhoo, they shuttered pretty quickly (Apple Store is still there, of course).

The people I worked with REALLY tried and cared to deliver what the bigger MS office asked for, but the distributed nature of the organization combined with a lack of unifying vision made delivering something great almost impossible.

Even with dedication, the result would be half-baked Wizards and ASP "solutions" that met the punch list requirements

I hadn't seriously considered a Porsche until I learned they make niche parts for cars for decades - like interior bits and trim that most brands stop making/carrying after about 10 years. You can get parts for a 2002-2016 Cayenne at the dealer, but even though it shares a TON of components with the 2002-2016 Touareg you won't be able to get the parts from VW that you can still source from Porsche for those same years.

Walked into the store, waited 30 minutes for one of their "friendly, professional staff" to come up & help me, making eye contact, etc.

Eventually I had to walk up to one of them standing there and tell them I wanted to buy something. Then it turns out they didn't even have one in stock...in their flagship London store...

Literally I wanted to walk in, pay immediately & walk out. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I don't know why people laude the "Apple experience".

The conversation literally would have been "can I help you?" "Yes I want a space grey m3 macbook air, 16gb ram 512gb ssd, I will pay for it right now and then leave this terrible place tyvm". With the laptop on-hand the purchasing process would've taken as little time as it took for them to ram it into pos and for my phone nfc to pay.

That's not entirely true. Microsoft is not just the Office and Windows 11 monolith of trash, but is made o dozens or even hundreds of small teams and silos, some making cool shit even though not all of them survived their niches or kept their quality.

>Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist.

Encarta, Visual Studio, the OG Xbox and 360, windows Phone 10, Zune, Surface Studio, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, AutoRoute, IntelliMice, trackballs and ergonomic keyboards, Kinect camera systems, Spot Watches, Hololens.

Their stock doesn't stuck. Latest figures show MSFT has a $3.69 Trillion market cap, while apple is sitting at $3.00 Trillion.

You're living in a bubble where you think "nobody uses Microsoft."

Gamers use Windows because (until recently, and even still only in specific contexts) you need Windows to game properly. Thankfully between things like the Proton framework and broader support for Mac and Linux gaming, that's starting to change.

People in business and government use Windows because Apple has never prioritized the Enterprise environment in MacOS, and it shows. And to be honest thank fuck, otherwise MacOS might be as bad as Windows is now.

A whole lot of regular people use Windows at home, because it's just the default and you can get PC's for dirt cheap (pre-tariffs anyway) that come preinstalled with it. However that market is eroding as people go full time on smartphones for general computing and computers become less relevant overall.

I'm not saying Windows is going away, the inertia is incredible there and I suspect they'll continue trotting along, being mediocre and pissing off everyone continuously because that's really what they've always done. But let us not pretend financial success in the market is in any way an indicator of a good product. Like evolution, markets do not select for "the best" they select for "the okayest" and Windows is very much the okayest OS.

That's the root cause of why the stores failed.

Think about it: how many people openly say that they love to use Apple products vs people who openly say they love Microsoft products?

I have never ever heard anybody say/write about a great Microsoft product.

I write all of this as someone who uses Windows, Teams and other Microsoft crap every day all day.

I ended up getting the lower cost machine and it was still great. It was still a Macbook pro. I don't remember what the spec difference was now but I do remember thinking back and realizing it was right. The higher specs really would not have added anymore life to the machine so it wasn't like I upgraded sooner than I would have otherwise.

Complete opposite of nearly any other tech purchasing process, always seem to want me to spend as much money as possible.

Especially, but not limited to, support.

He came back a few minutes later when he saw me scanning a QR code on the price tag. Odd since I signaled I didn't need anything. He asked again, "Anything you need help with?" - This time I was still wishy-washy but said "Yeah, I'm checking the inputs on this soundbar to see if it has 3.5mm and how many HDMI ports it has".

And without asking any more details, he smiled and said "Alright!" and walked away. We were completely baffled.

Works reasonably well. When I worked retail we had a person whose MO was to come into the store, browse the expensive headphones, take one off the shelf and put it down on the floor with their book bag while they looked at something else. After about 10 or 15 minutes they’d pick up the book bag and sweep the headphones inside as they were standing up and then walk out the door. If you stopped by while they were looking at the other thing and asked them if they needed any help with finding some accessories for the headphones or just offering to “hold it at the register” for them, they would wind up putting them back (or handing them to you and tell you they changed their mind) and leaving.

I find the user experience with Microsoft products to be bad. They continually have inconsistencies with their shortcut key bindings. Example would be Ctrl+F, find something but in Outlook it forwards and email. Visual Studio has numerous bad user experiences that they choose not to fix. Example is you cannot stash individual files in GIT, it is all or nothing. Only way around is GIT via terminal environment. It is 2025 and Visual Studio still cannot display source code in Vertical and Horizontal at the same time, one or the other. VSCode has had this feature forever. You have to pay me to use Microsoft software.

I don't need to use spreadsheets so Excel has no value to me. If a spreadsheet is needed, it is the most basic and LibreOffice works just fine. Only reason I use Outlook is because of IT. I don't even use Word and use MarkDown with PDF generators, plain text, or LaTex for documentation.

Microsoft had to universally disable Registry backups via a Windows 10 Update because they sold Surface laptops with low storage. Registry backups where filling up the hard-drive. These are the ones trying to compete against Google's Chromebooks.

WINE / Proton is displacing Windows in the PC gaming market. It actually gives users a better experience in some instances. Example would be that shaders can be compiled without running the game. Windows Direct X implementation will only compile shaders while the game is running. This will lower the FPS and has known to cause stuttering during first play through.

I will never install Windows OS on any of my computers ever again. The OS keeps getting worse and worse with newer versions. I've reached a point where if I need Windows OS the game / software is not desired and no money will change hands. I also will no longer buy a desktop or laptop that forces Windows to be purchased too. If there is ever a reason I need Window it will be installed as a VM.

The only application from Microsoft I will most likely use is VSCode and I'm trying to replace it with Zed and other tooling.

There is no argument people don't use Microsoft. The argument is the products coming out of Microsoft are low quality. Still waiting on Azure's feature to delete a GIT pull request in case sensitive information was accidentally pushed to the repository [0]. Microsoft truly does not respect the end user. You can see this with their forced bloat-ware such as Cortana, XBox features, and Recall, and user request never ending request to remove these useless / unused features.

Don't worry, their stock will go up as they push more advertisements onto the desktop for Home users. Investors love such trash.

[0] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Allow-deletion...

1) No upsell pressure. We all got a flat hourly wage, so whether you bought the 5k computer or the 1k computer, we earned the same money. So focus on selling the customer the right computer for their needs.

2) It’s better to send the customer somewhere else or let them walk out the door than it is to sell them something that won’t work for them. Sort of a corollary to the first item, but the idea was more than anything, customers should feel like they could trust us. And if building that trust meant telling the customer “we do have USB cables, but the Belkin one we’re selling for $25 is no better for your printer than the generic brand Best Buy is selling across the street” then that’s what we did. A customer who trusts us is a customer that comes back, and a customer that comes back is a customer that buys more things. Sure they may not buy the USB cable today, but next month when they’re buying some other thing for their computer, they might just pick up some other cable or item that they might be able to get cheaper elsewhere, but they’re already here, we have it and they trust us to stock quality items.

3) Never ever make something up or guess. All the computers are fully functional and hooked up to the internet for a reason. If you don’t know the answer, tell that to the customer and take them over to a computer and look it up with them. You get a chance to demo the machine, you get a chance to let the customer try out the machine and most importantly you maintain that trust. The customer can feel confident you’re not bullshitting them, and they can feel confident in the answer you finally do reach because you looked it up together.

Apple’s opposition to being anything like CompUSA or other computer retailers at the time was IMO a huge factor in making their stores as big and popular as they were and are. Unfortunately my experience by the time I left was Apple’s rapid growth meant they were hiring more and more from outside the pool of “Apple enthusiasts ” and more and more from the wider retail world. It’s really hard to “untrain” the “high pressure commission sales” mindset from folks who have needed to live off that sort of sales approach. We’d also started to see some of it come down from above in the form of tracking individual “attachment metrics” like AppleCare. Back when AppleCare didn’t have accidental damage coverage, the pressure to sell AppleCare with the product in question rather than after the fact (at the time, up to 1 year after purchase) was antithetical to their otherwise strong focus on no upsells and building trust.

Oh man, that would have really set me off. What's the point of customer demos if the employees are going to ruin them?

I, uniquely it seems, had a great experience with a Microsoft store. And it almost made me buy a surface studio, but a decade later, I've admittedly only ever upgraded my MacBooks...

When I first went to the new Microsoft store near by university, I really wanted to try the Studios (I was an art minor; it seemed amazing to draw on). I ended up sitting there in the mall drawing on it for a few hours while my friends shopped. I apparently attracted a crowd, and the local employees called corporate to tell them. They asked for my number and I ended up getting a call from a Microsoft marketing employee asking to talk to me because they wanted to turn this "spontaneous mall moment" into a TV ad. I don't think an ad ever aired though.

They abandoned forms and WPF, and UWP is getting much the same treatment.

Also there was the whole framework/standard/core fiasco

It was last year, 2024, in the year of our lord ChatGPT.

Oh, I certainly had a good look around in the 20-30 minutes I was waiting for attention. But I couldn't find anything like what you describe, nor staff to interact with me to at least get directed to the right place (which would take 10 seconds).

I mean I'm not saying it's a _bad_ shop. I'm just saying it's not always the angelic, golden, sterile, etc experience that many claim.

Need a seat, mirror, air conditioner vent trim, logo for your trunk, floormats? No luck with most manufacturer... and these are the kind of parts the 3rd party supplier market doesn't even attempt to do.

I still have a warranty (factory) on my other German car, but even though it is only 7 years old they do not stock or make a replacement for the hybrid battery. So even though it failed and is under warranty, the manufacturer cannot fix it. This has been ongoing over 11 months now; apparently it wouldn't happen with Porsche

Refreshing a QueryTable object or ListObject that has the filldown option enabled to automatically copy formatting and formulæ to all cells in the same column of the object can cause all or part of the object's header row to be copied into the body of the object. There are workarounds of varying ease and varying reliability.

There's still no visible indication whether an edit box that accepts cell references or formulæ is currently in the mode where using the arrow keys inserts cell references and has no undo stack, or is in the mode where it acts like a normal textbox.

The security model still allows a user to specify that sorting and autofiltering a locked worksheet is allowed, but does not actually implement it. Trying to use those features on a locked sheet fails with a permissions error.

Similarly, if a formula returns an array, you cannot use Autofilter or right-click->Sort. Even if the array is 1-dimensional (and thus, your action applies to the entire array), Excel complains that you cannot modify part of an array. There's a workaround, that amounts to re-implementing both Autofilter and Sort using lambda(), let(), and parameter cells.

Excel doesn't like to switch reliably between sheets that aren't at the same zoom level, sometimes drawing one of them at the previous's sheet's zoom…but using blurry upscaling. Or sometimes just stops drawing part a sheet or parts of the UI, requiring Excel to be relaunched.

The web version is really a completely new spreadsheet …with unfortunately the same name as the desktop application. They have different bugs, and different features.

They have too many kinds of add-ins, each with a different management interface, and too many scripting languages. Actually, the mere number of them wouldn't be a problem…if they all worked both in desktop and on the web. As is, there's no way to script the two Excels that guarantees function in both the online and offline applications. Some of types of add-in or scripting actions can be implemented with lambda().

…Euh…I could go on for far-far too long. (^_^);

And Alt-Q to find Excel features is kinda good. There's usually a short annoying delay while Excel activates the feature. And once it returns results, it never places the keyboard focus on the first result, so you always have to down-arrow instead of just pressing enter to accept the first result.