Posted on 06/30/2007 8:54:43 PM PDT by Star Traveler
Mac users 'ecstatic' about new Apple Store
by: ALTHEA PETERSON World Staff Writer
6/30/2007
After up to 12 hours of waiting, the Tulsa Apple Store's first customers swarmed through its gates at Woodland Hills Mall on Friday evening.
The 6 p.m. store opening coincided with the unveiling of Apple's iPhone nationwide.
While many were in line to purchase the new phone, other local Apple fans were there to revel in the uniqueness of the new store.
Rachelle Murphy, a member of the Tulsa Users of Macintosh Society from Broken Arrow, said it was an exciting day for Apple and Macintosh lovers in the area. She said she was once jealous of Oklahoma City's Apple Store and had waited for Tulsa's to open since 7 a.m. Friday.
"It's fun because you get to meet other Mac users and others who are not now but will be by the end of the day with the new store opening," Murphy said. "Mac users are kind of like a cult -- well, not a cult, but a club.
"The experience we have with Macs is a completely different beast. They're much more secure. There's so many different creative things you can do with the machine."
The Apple Store's employees greeted the estimated 400 people in line when the store opened. Scott Woodliff, the store's general manager, said it was a great day for Tulsa.
"We obviously want to thank you all for coming," Woodliff told the cheering crowd. "It's an exciting moment for Apple, but also the Tulsa community."
The first Apple Store customers had arrived outside the business when the mall opened its doors about 6 a.m. Friday. Connor Sokolosky, 14, of Tulsa and his 9-year-old brother, Chandler, were there solely for the iPhone.
"The phone's better than anything that's been created, and I like the features," Connor said. "Plus, it's fun to say you waited in line for 12 hours."
Matthew Swaggart, another of the first customers in line, ran straight for the register to buy an iPhone when the mall gate lifted, allowing shoppers into the store.
"I'm a big Mac fan because the software just works for me," said Swaggart, a Tulsa photographer. "I'm completely ecstatic. I use Apple software, so being able to get support at the store will be good."
What will the Apple Store mean for surrounding businesses? Ronda Adams, assistant manager of The Sharper Image in the mall, said she is excited about the opening.
"I think it's going to be really good," she said. "I think it's more of a cooperation. We have a lot of things they don't have . . . a lot of Sharper Image iPod accessories."
Althea Peterson 918-581-8361
althea.peterson@tulsaworld.com
You should have heard the cheers when the Apple Store opened its doors (actually a "gate" since it's inside the mall...). There was a rousing cheer (many of them), as if everyone was at a football game, cheering on their home team... LOL...
Broken Arrow, by the way, is a suburb of Tulsa. The only other Apple store in the state of Oklahoma is in Oklahoma City...
Regards, Star Traveler
The picture, by the way, is at —
http://www.tulsaworld.com/articleimages/2007/070630_A1_spanc72666_apple130.jpg
just in case it doesn’t show up right here. I took several showing the huge crowds, but I don’t have a server to show it from...
Another story about the new Apple Store in Tulsa, with more detail. It was also on the front page of the main Tulsa paper, Saturday morning’s paper... [if you’re interested for the other Macintosh people...]
I’m sitting in Starbucks on Peoria in Tulsa and a lady next to me had her young grade school son with her and he was fawning over my Macintosh laptop... LOL...
I told her about the new Apple Store opening at Woodland Hills mall in Tulsa (one of the big shopping centers in town) and said she could get all her questions answered and get her hands on the machines and find out all she wanted to there.
She wanted to get one for her son... and, of course, I encouraged her... She said that she has a Dell at home (a desktop) but her sone wants a Mac.... :-)
Regards,
Star Traveler
Wonder if they will replace batteries in the iPhone for free when they start to fail?
Well, I keep wondering when Apple is going out of business. I’ve been reading about it for the last 20 years... LOL!!
Once you switch, you won’t switch back. I can run OSX, Unix, and Windows (never really do) on my system. Love OSX. By far the best interface i’ve ever used. Apple can do software and elegant hardware. Makes most recent PCs i’ve used seem ancient.
I was ecstatic when we got a new apple store here in Jacksonville... then I bought some things from them :o(
I’ll stick with my Mac, but from now on I’ll be buying them exclusively from the local CompUSA.
I have a MacBook and got Office for Mac installed. Sometimes if I email a Word or Excel file I created on the MAC to someone’s PC they can’t open it. I’ve then emailed the same file to my desktop PC and then re-emailed it out from the PC and it works. Wierd.
I LOVE my MacBook and would be lost without it!
As far as the actual Macintosh computer equipment and/or iPods — you’re not going to find discounts anywhere. There might be some promotions for a printer give-away or something like that, but the Apple Store has those at times, too.
I think I’ve seen some discounts from Amazon.com for Apple Macintosh computers. There’s a possibility.
As far as the accessories, you might get some good discounts “online” — like from Amazon.com or other online sources (watch out there, though — as some are not reliable vendors...)
So, accessories can be cheaper elsewhere, but computer equipment is going to be the same everywhere. I think you may get some preference for repairs and/or help if you buy it from the Apple Store, if you carry it in. If it’s a major repair, though, maybe not...
Regards,
Star Traveler
I didn’t say anything about discounts. The customer service was abysmal.
They actually wanted me to make an appointment with the “genius bar” to return a defective eight hundred dollar monitor THE DAY AFTER I BOUGHT IT!
Prior to that, I bought a scanner from them. When we opened the box, the glass was broken. Upon returning it, they told my wife “yeah, we’ve been having a problem with them coming in like that.”
Of course when I mentioned the scanner problem while returning the monitor the store manager made sure to tell me she’d never heard of such problems, so many times I began to feel like she was impugning my honesty.
It takes me 45 minutes to get to the apple store from my house. When I have to piss away 3 hours of my time to correct problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place, I expect some form of compensation besides “sorry for YOUR problem, have a nice day.”
Our CompUSA has an official apple rep. on staff that’s been there for five years and is a hell of a lot more appreciative of small business than the granola crunching, sandaled, half-wit they brought in from California to run the apple store.
Try saving it as one of the previous versions of Word from the pulldown before sending it. It should work fine.
Some cults are good and others are bad....
Jim Jones group — bad
Republicans — good
Democrats — bad
Rajneeshis [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh] — bad
Macintosh Users — good
Christians — good
Atheists — bad
Muslims — bad
Windows users — whacked...
and so on...
That picture reminds me of those idiots in Kurdistan that stoned that young teenaged girl to death — they all were carrying around their cel phones, taking pictures (and videos) of the girl’s stoning... what a bunch of whackos...
They looked just like that picture, except they didn’t have iPhones yet. What do you bet that they get iPhones over there in those whacked out Islamic-fanatical areas before anywhere else in the world...
Apple ought to deny them even owning an iPhone over there — they’re too stupid to live...
That’s very odd about the service — in light of the following —
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1858884/posts?page=53#53
Don’t know what’s going on in that particular store, because — overall — Apple seems to be doing very well in the customer service area...
All I can say about that is if Apple has a few of those kinds of problems, then it’s obvious the rest of the PC area (of other companies) is having probably ten times worse problems in the customer service area...
“Well, I keep wondering when Apple is going out of business. I’ve been reading about it for the last 20 years... LOL!!”
Well, at one time that was a very real possibility. Now that they’ve tapped a new market, not gonna happen.
If they were ever going to go out of business, it was because of the “soda pop king” — Sculley — who thought he was still selling pop. It’s a good thing that Apple got Steve Jobs back again — someone who knows how to make and sell good products.
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