New Apple Centre

A new Apple Store has opened up in London’s Regent Street, which is the first to open in Europe. It’s been very eagerly awaited, and it’s said that some people decided to sleep outside in the street for two nights in order to be among the first people to go in there.

The store is on two levels, and with very noisy music inside – and different music on each floor, which obviously is not pleasant to listen to. The biggest thing you’ll notice is that there are lots of Macs around, from the bottom of Apple’s range (the 32-bit eMac and iBook systems) to the top (the 64-bit iMac and PowerMac). All the machines are plugged into the Internet, and I was able to check my email and even do work on this blog using them!

So, surely some people will cotton onto the fact that this place is a free internet café without the coffee. I wonder how long that will last. There are also lots of iPods for the visitor to try, and the computers are laden with just about every kind of Mac software. Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Photoshop – it’s all there. (They’ve not allowed us to use Terminal, though. Wonder why …)

The phrase that springs to mind is “what’s the big deal?”. Unlike a lot of people I’m not that much into the iPod except as a convenient storage device. I’m sure cheaper storage devices exist, though – the Mini costs nearly 200 pounds for about 15 gigabytes. One problem I noticed is that people had left vast amounts of software running, which really did make a dent in the computer’s speed, although I suspect that these machines are a bit slow anyway – some reviewers have commented that the screen on some of the new iMacs are a bit slow. I didn’t have cause to check out the Genius Bar, where you can go to talk about your Mac issues with an official company Genius (with or, it seems, without an appointment). Apart from the free web surfing, I don’t think it detained me for an hour in two visits put together. And it was crowded. That should get better as the novelty wears off, however.