My iDay
Retail in New York is vastly different from the rest of the country - our supermarkets, for example, are generally smaller and packed with international items...Whole Foods is a relatively new phenomenon, and takeout/delivery is as much a staple of life as wheat itself.I generally find the shopping experience in the city depressing and time-consuming, so (except for food - I have a fabulous food co-op near my apartment) I order most of my goods online and have them delivered.
My 14-year-old daughter wanted an iPod for her birthday - her Mini had died and she wanted a Nano - so of course my first instinct was to go to the website and order it. But then I thought...these Apple stores are praised to the skies as destinations. Why not, as a good digital citizen, go see what that's all about?
Of course, it dawned on my as I approached the store on 59th Street and 5th Avenue and saw the looming crowd outside, my daughter chose to be born 14 years to the day before Apple is releasing their iPhone.
Yes, folks, there are people CAMPED OUT outside that store, awaiting that gadget. I saw camp chairs, backpacks, water bottles, towels - and I don't know that the towels were so useful during the horrid storm we had last night...is it worth getting struck by lightning to have one of the first iPhones?
I bopped downstairs (yes, I bopped) and one of the guys there hooked me up with a cute blue Nano (I know my kid isn't reading this), and the extended warranty because these things are as delicate as divas and break if you frown at them, and a truly fabulous blue Belkin case. What I loved is that he had a credit card swiper hanging around his neck, so he could ring me up on the spot.
A cool (rare) retail experience in New York. Then I came home and read this blog called Print Is Dead - his post was on the iPhone, and how consumers love devices that integrate functions rather than separating them:
In fact, if it succeeds the way that?s being predicted, the ?phone? part of the equation will be the least interesting part (since most people already have a cell phone; that?s not why they?re buying an iPhone). Instead, why people are lusting after the iPhone (apart from the usual Apple scruffs who have to own everything Jobsian) is because they?re dying for a gadget that will do multiple things. Yes, they want a cell phone and iPod combo, but they also want something that can send and receive e-mail, watch videos, surf the Web, etc. They want all of these things in one device, and the iPhone will soon arrive to make this a reality.The author goes on to say that this has been the problem with e-book readers - they only do one thing. Which was my argument in the last Download column in The Big Picture - that a standalone device that only reads books will have a minimal following, and that laptops are already the device of choice for a great deal of reading, precisely because they are already handling other tasks. (I got some interesting feedback disagreeing with this, and I hope that this appears on the website shortly.)
What I offer:
