The biggest Apple Store ever (with rant following)

It's in Boston. Here's how it's being described:

The three-story, 20,000-square-foot store sits smack in the middle of the posh Boylston Street shopping strip. The glass-fronted store is sandwiched between a pair of older stone buildings, a juxtaposition described by one Gizmodo commentator as "a diamond in a rock pile."

More from:

• Wired


• Techsuperpowers (who supplied the photo)


• Gizmodo

If there are two things Apple is really, really good at, they are design and marketing. I can't think of another corporate entity that even comes close. From the products to the stores, the packaging to the advertising, I don't know how they make it happen at such a high level. But they do -- and have done it for decades at this point.

I'm not an Apple partisan, although I do have a few under my wing, as it were. I don't agree with Apple's "mission," or its propensity to fill a few niches very well while ignoring or slighting larger segments of the public (who are free to overpay for hardware and software that does, for the most part, work great but remains overpriced).

Anyhow, my petty annoyances aside, there are so many elements of pure genius in almost every move Apple has made in the past decade. From abandoning an old architecture for the sake of technological advancement and clarity (from "Classic" OS to OS X, from PowerPC to Intel) to opening up new consumer-focused territory (iPod, iPhone) while not being too afraid to fail (AppleTV, Mac Cube, even the lamp-style Mac).

My greatest regret about Apple is that when they did have a "lower-priced" line -- most recently the eMac -- it wasn't that low in price. Now they only break the $1,000 price point with the nearly neglected MacMini. That's why there was such a clamor when the Psystar Mac clone came out a few weeks ago. People out there want a desktop Mac that can easily accommodate additional RAM, hard drives, video cards, etc., that costs well under $1,000. Apple can do it but chooses not to. I like the iMacs, but I'm not so comfortable with their disposability or their cost.

And while I acknowledge that the world of proprietary software is still with us, the software landscape has been totally remade in the past 15 years, and the reality is that free, open-source applications and operating systems offer almost all of us more functionality and security that what we've been paying many hundreds of dollars for, over and over again ... or stealing, which is what many do when faced with yet another costly, unproven upgrade.

But as I say each and every time I write about Apple, who am I to criticize one of the most successful tech companies in history? I could go on about how iTunes is both great and evil at the same time (they lock you in, they're locking everybody in), why nobody but Apple has the stones -- and the expertise -- to create the iPhone, and how OpenOffice 3, which is in the testing stages, will change the Macintosh game for good. But I'll leave all that for later.