Posted on 09/29/2015 8:12:12 PM PDT by Swordmaker
The Broadway Apple Store (Photo: Matt Buchanan/Flickr)
In more ancient times, when communal experiences were mediated by religion, crowds used to gather outside temples on feast days. In Biblical times, for instance, on pilgrimage holidays like Passover, Jewish people were supposed to travel to Jerusalem, to be present at the Holy Temple, where the High Priest would make a sacrifice to God.
Nowadays, we have Apple Release Day—the Feast of St. Jobs—when faithful customers gather outside Apple stores and await the renewal of a next generation iPhone.
But is the Apple store really like a sacred space? To find out, Atlas Obscura brought a cultural historian to a Manhattan location for some feedback.
One of the first lessons from Erica Robles-Anderson, a professor at New York University, is that the collective experience of an Apple release does not come about by chance. Not far from the Apple Store in SoHo, one of New York’s high-end shopping districts, a Samsung store opened recently. “They had giant ropes outside, as if anticipating a giant crowd, and big bouncer-looking people in fancy suits,” she says. “And then...crickets."
The problem wasn't just a lack of PR. "It was a deep misunderstanding about special access, as opposed to what Apple has built, which is the feeling of being in it together, as though you were fighting something," Robles-Anderson says, "even though it’s the most valuable company in the world.”
Robles-Anderson studies the role of media technology in the production of public space. Recently, her work has focused on churches, and how they’ve used technology to enhance collective space. “We forget that cathedrals were basically high end technology,” she says. So were Stonehenge and the Buddhas carved into mountains. More recently, the first indoor installation of a Jumbo-tron was at California’s Crystal Church, one object of her study. “People have used technology for a long time to speak to the gods,” she says—to create collective experiences of the sublime.
These days, technology is more often talked about as a way to create personalized, individual experiences, but Robles-Anderson thinks that’s only part of the story. Communal ritual is always a part of technology: Early computers came into group spaces, like families and offices. (Mad Men understood this dynamic: the computer as an event weathered together.) Powerpoint presentations gather people to look at giant screens. Even using an iPhone to tune out the human beings around you requires being part of a larger group.
And Apple, more than any other technology company, has been able to access both these experiences, the individual and the collective. “They feel iconic, like an emblem of the personal,” says Robles-Anderson. “And yet it's a cult. Right? It's so obviously a cult.”
An Apple store in Paris (Photo: Mikhail (Vokabre) Shcherbakov/Wikimedia)
On our way to the SoHo Apple store, just around noon, we pass the beginnings of a line, forming in anticipation of the release of the iPhone 6s. Within the next twenty hours, before Apple employees begin selling phones, at 8 a.m., it will extend down the block, around the corner and on down the street.
It’s kept, though, neatly out of sight from the gates of the Apple store. This one was built in a former post office, another collective space, which, Robles-Anderson points out, enabled the packaging and transit of information. The old designation, STATION A, is carved in stone above the giant doors, edged in black.
“The oversized doors are fantastic,” says Robles-Anderson. “There’s no reason for them.” They’re there only to communicate that this place is important. Also, they’re heavy, like church doors, to give purpose and portent to the entry into the space.
We walk inside. It’s light and bright, and immediately in front of us, a wide staircase of opaque glass sweeps up to the second floor.
This is an old, old trick. “It’s used in ziggurats, even,” Robles-Anderson says. “It creates a space that emphasizes your smallness when you walk in. You look at something far away, and that makes your body feel like you’re entering somewhere sacred or holy.”
To enter that sacred space, first we have to walk up a few stone steps. They’re wide and deep, enough that you have to slow down just a bit to walk up them. Steep and narrow steps create the same effect in that they make your body feel as if something important is happening. Above, a massive skylight, stretching the length of the room, lets in the light. To the right and left are the tables with phones and watches arranged around the periphery—a clue that this is not supposed to be an individual experience. Even when you are holding the phone in your hand, you are gathered around a table with others. There are no aisles here to sequester yourself in: thanks to the open floor plan, you experience the phone together with everyone in the store.
“They have this beautiful, excessive use of clear surfaces,” Robles-Anderson says. “You’re always seeing others and being seen by others. And the ways that any employee can serve you feels personal, but it’s going on all around you, in a cacophony of like-mindedness.”
We ascend. To reach the second floor, we must pass under a walkway that crosses the entry’s vertical expanse. This is another strategy borrowed from holy spaces. “You slightly drop the ceiling, so that when you come out underneath it, you have the feeling of the sublime and this massive expanse opens that feels awesome, literally—psychologically and in your body,” Robles-Anderson explains. And as we walk under the walkway and up the stairs, without even thinking about it, I look up and straight into the sky.
The SoHo Apple store (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
The second floor has a different purpose than the first. This is the place where Apple’s equivalent of priests—the Geniuses—impart knowledge. Immediately in front of us is a giant screen and a few rows of plush chairs. In contrast to the open room below, it’s dark, inviting, and intimate. This darkness is necessary to create the effect downstairs, too, a contrast to the sweeping space and the light. A Genius is on the platform, demonstrating an esoteric piece of Apple lore, a multiple-step undo. “It also reminds you of Steve Jobs on the stage,” says Robles-Anderson.
Any individual Apple store has to take on this task, reminding its local congregation that they are part of an even larger community, centered on Cupertino and, ultimately, Jobs' vision. Although other stores take different forms, shaped to the buildings that they inhabits, these tropes carry through. On 14th Street, a three-story store in a old warehouse, a see-through spiral stairway right at the entrance pulls you upwards, bathed in light. On Broadway, just north of Columbus Circle, walls and ceilings of glass enclose a cathedral-like space, backed by a beige stone wall, in which the quiet talk of customers is amplified into the noise of a crowd; downstairs, the Genius bar is kept quieter, darker, but when you walk back up that same opaque, spiral staircase, it’s like floating upwards towards a more heavenly realm.
An Apple Store in Shanghai (Photo: Jon Skilling/Flickr)
“There's more and more evidence that we've never stopped worrying about cosmological questions or communities,” says Robles-Anderson. “Technology is part of the fantasy that we've progressed away from those kind of explanations.” But in her ideal world, medievalists who think about God’s omnipresence, his connection to certain physical objects, and the meaning of that material culture, would be hired by cloud storage companies. “They’re dealing with the exact same problems,” she says. “Are you files really on your personal device or are they in the cloud in the sky?”
Apple seems to understand that the people who visit their store are looking for answering to questions deeper than how they should make calls or connect to the internet. On the walls of the stores, framed by the border of a screen, are pictures of planets and star systems—with these flat, luminescent, monolithic devices, they seem to promise, you can understand the entire universe.
This so-called professor, who claims to know so much, actually demonstrates her cluelessness about Apple, a company which has sold 1.2 BILLION iOS devices, based on the few hundred people who queue to buy devices on a release day at each Apple store that "“And yet it's a cult. Right? It's so obviously a cult.” . . . "Right?" she asks. . . she doesn't know. She IS clueless.
Thanks to Freeper NYer for the heads up. . .
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I will go with cult.
When the rest of technology has passed you by and you wait in line at midnight for catch-up devices at twice the market prices, how can it be anything else than a cult to the brand?
Sarah honey,
I think you need to get out more. A picnic perhaps. Or professional would be good too.
Apple stores are just one of many temples of consumerism.
Every city and town has temple districts. Some are fancier than others.
Nah, I personally think banks are still way ahead. After all, you can’t buy without $$$.
Exact.Same.Problems.
That’s really funny!
It is a silly article and was, I suspect, written apparently solely as an excuse for showing the beauty of a number of Apple stores.
Perhaps the author can do an article on a Devil Worshippers’ Temple used by Android users who have, as one of their main DV tenets, a belief in the need to hate Apple, Apple products and Apple users. Just kidding, of course.
In that last pic, is that the hanging apple of Damocles?
LOL!
Now you know that I'm nobody's fanboi: I run Windows, Linux, Unix, and OS X; I like Fujitsu, Samsung, and Apple hardware; etc. And you also know that I've worked with Apple gear since the Apple II, with MSDOS/Windows gear since the first IBM-PC, and with Unix gear since 1985.
So please take this gently.
Of course Apple mania has some aspects of a cult -- I don't think that's a bad thing. Excitement over technology is natural, and some percentage of excited people will be passionate to the point of excess. Gearheads will be gearheads, fans will be fans.
Only a small percentage of fans (Apple, Windows, Linux, etc.) are possessed of a "cult mentality", in which their favored thing -- company, product line, operating system, whatever -- can do nothing wrong. Sports fans and automobile fans do exactly the same thing.
SO WHAT?
I see nothing wrong with it. I might giggle and point when it's silly. But in the case of Apple, the end result is some gorgeous architecture that is the modern equivalent of the cathedrals of medieval Europe. Celebrate it! Embrace the extravagance that gives us such beauty.
And, of course, prepare for the inevitable cat-calls from those who are fans of the "other team". Big deal.
Forget about your silly whims, it doesn’t fit the plan.
When the Samsung Galaxy 6s came out in April, sellers were offering the Galaxy S6 discounted on Amazon for between $849.99 and $1,139.00 and the Galaxy S6 Edge for between $1,105.00 and $1,335.00. Source.
The Apple iPhone 6s sells for $649 to $849, and the iPhone 6s Plus $749 to $949. Source.
SO MUCH FOR YOUR CLAIM OF TWICE THE MARKET PRICES!
Do you really want to criticize Apple for their prices in light of that information?
As for playing "catch up", no other cellular phone on the market has anything like Touch 3D and the iPhone 6, much less the iPhone 6S, was already FASTER than almost any Android phone on the market and now the iPhone 6S is 90 TIMES faster than than the iPhone 6! In fact, its processor is the equivalent of the processor in a MacBook notebook computer. Good luck with finding that level in your SnapDragons.
So much for the "catch up" meme.
ROTFLMAO. . .
Again, so much for your claims of "catch-up devices". . . why don't you come into the twenty-first century and the best mobile devices in the world:
Fastest cell phone memory... important to have if you need to model global warming, while updating your twitter feed, in rush hour traffic, in your Apple iCar.
The fact that you dismiss functionality and just look at market trends shows the cult following.
The iPhone 6 (fill in the blanks here) is still behind the Android, all versions.
More importantly, he adults in the room just waited for the versions of the Android to be available.
You little kids line up for the catch-up devices.
A little bit faster isn’t a differentiator.
And your maps still haven’t come close to Google navigation.
Cult. No question.
Market trends? ???? Do you even have a flipping clue what that chart from AnandTECH is all about? ???
You make yourself look like an idiot, it has NOTHING to do with "market trends", it is a technical bench mark showing that the iPhone 6S is TWO times faster than the closest speed Android phone on the market in sequentially storing data to internal memory.
You don't use these devices and you aren't even qualified to express an opinion, especially one which is based on a hilariously ignorant reading of that chart, claiming it's about "market trends," and then calling the people who can correctly that they are "children!" when you just demonstrated your abysmal ignorance! ROTFLMAO!
Pardon me. . . that's the chart for sequential reads. . . The speed is about the same for sequential writes. They look the same. My apologies.
However, this quotation from the same source cuts through the fog, and shoots down freedumb's idiotic argument:
Overall, NAND performance is impressive, especially in sequential cases. Apple has integrated a mobile storage solution that I haven’t seen in any other device yet, and the results suggest that they’re ahead of just about every other OEM in the industry here by a significant amount.
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