Pray

Steve Jobs never lacked chutzpah. Even though there's retail space aplenty throughout the city -- and Mac fanatics will clearly go anywhere -- why not shell out the bucks for one of the most prestigious addresses in the Manhattan? And forget huge display windows -- why not put the nasty nuts and bolts of the retail operation underground and just create an air of mystery and simplicity at street level (ala Steve Wynn)? Why not spend millions of dollars on an entirely glass cube?


Chutzpah, indeed.

Apple has been opening their own stores since 2001, but this one is the grand-daddy of them all. Huge, sleek, 24/365, and meant to impress the socks off you. And it does.

And that kind of makes me sad.

Much like the Boston Red Sox fans, whose identity was based around perpetually rooting for a losing team, being a longtime Mac user in 2006 makes me feel a little dizzy. Suddenly, instead of being a rag-tag bunch of fuckups who use computers with a 4% market share because we like their design aesthetic and the culture they embody, we're part of a growing band of geeks and style conscious kids who want what Apple now has -- superior hardware running a superior operating system. Back 5 or 6 years ago, though, the lines weren't so clear. It was a holy war (remember?), you were either Mac or PC and the debate was vicious. Mac users were a cult, a small band of Davids fighting the Goliaths of hegemony with our Quadras and desk accessories. But now, just ahead of the tipping point of (what I predict will be) huge double digit Macintosh market share growth, Steve Jobs has already erected his victory arch.

The opening on Friday was like a religious tent revival. The line to get inside stretches for several miles. The Apple store employees clapped as people emerged with shiny new MacBooks. People on the street were dancing as they neared the door. And here we were, on on one of the toniest blocks in New York. It seemed surreal -- but the meme was clear -- Apple had won the war. As one of the faithful, looking at this scene (I didn't wait in line on Friday, just hung around for 10 minutes, taking it all in), I should have felt elated, but I didn't.

Apple, I feared, jumped the shark for me. It's hard to sell counterculture when you are fast on your way to becoming the dominant force in the digital age. And counterculture was what I loved about Apple. I liked being an oppressed minority. I wore it as a badge of honor. As the last few years have rolled by, bringing us iBooks and iPods and OS X, my pride in being in that minority swelled. "Finally!" I said, "The blind have seen the light!" But then the trickle became a torrent. Geeky sites like Slashdot and Digg now seems to traffic in 25% Apple news, up from virtually nothing a few years ago. Everybody seems to be getting on the bandwagon (Dan, I'm looking at you!) My feeling is probably pretty similar being a Scientologist watching Tom Cruise on Oprah...at first you're thinking "That's my guy," which slowly becomes, "Oh, shit!" Like the Red Sox fans, I'm so used to feeling one way that I don't know how to feel now.



Nevertheless, I went to the temple yesterday. Paid my respects. Attempted to win a laptop. Blogged. It's a beautiful store, and the design sense of the products and the retail experience is more than enough to keep me around. I may lapse in my faith, but I'll always be practicing.