maniaAs I walked pass the Telstra TLife shop in Sydney CBD today, it was deserted more so than usual. Then the bright lights and 3 storeys of ceiling-to-floor glass walls from the building right across the street grabbed my attention, and it was fully packed! I had walked pass the building many times before but never noticed it until then. Suddenly I realised that it was the new Apple Store on George Street, Sydney which was just opened 5pm yesterday. They had renovated the building and now it stands out among its neighbouring 100-year-old sandstone buildings.
I am not an Apple user (that's right, not even iPod) but I am a visual person - I am drawn to anything that looks good. Apple products certainly fit the bill. Usually the first thing I notice about the Mac is its high quality screens. In Uni, I used to have arguments with my die-hard Apple devotee friend about Mac being over priced, under-featured toys comparing to PC. But we always agreed that Mac had good monitors.
On 2nd floor of the Apple Store, I briefly attended a workshop on Apple iWeb. As I was late, I did not catch the whole story, but in the conclusion note, the presenter said that the product (iWeb v2.x) was designed for small/family/fun use rather than large-scale business eCommerce sites. I guess that is true to all Apple products as Apple really projects an image of making technology fun.
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Found this great quote from Steve Jobs:
"At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.
"We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film. We don't stop production for five months. We've gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't.
"Well, you know what? It's been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too.... Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'
"And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we'd made and ideas we'd had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, 'All this work you've [done] for the last year, we're going to have to throw it away and start over, and we're going to have to work twice as hard now because we don't have enough time.' And you know what everybody said? 'Sign us up.' "
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