Thoughts From An Apple Store
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Cathedral of Screens
Earlier this week, I found myself with a lot of time to kill in the Apple Store. Eve was getting a long overdue upgrade—a new laptop and an iPad. I’ve owned plenty of Apple products over the years, but I realised I’d never actually spent much time in the store alone, left to my own devices, so to speak.
The Apple Store was once the crown jewel of modern retail—a space that seemed to leap straight out of the future. I still remember when they first opened, and everyone lost their minds. It was as if the media decided that Apple hadn’t just revolutionised technology—they’d reinvented the experience of shopping itself.
Apple wasn’t just selling products; they were selling a vision, a glimpse into what the world could be. But now we’re in that future—the world they sold us.
As I stood there, with time to really observe, an unexpected feeling began to settle in—a sense of unease that grew stronger the longer I stood around. The store, once a symbol of cutting-edge innovation, now felt oddly oppressive to me.
An Apple Store is a cathedral of screens. Rectangles of perfectly machined aluminium, lined up and displayed with military precision. It’s a space containing trillions of transistors—one of the most important human discoveries since fire. The craftsmanship and engineering involved in making them unparalleled.
At home, amidst the comforting textures of wood, textiles, and the everyday clutter of life, my MacBook is a standout object. Its sleek design blends in just enough, while still asserting it’s personality as a piece of sculptural engineering. But in the Apple Store, surrounded by rows of identical machines, each screen angled just so, to force the customer to engage with the product. A subtle but calculated interaction, tilting the screen towards you for a better view – felt unsettling.
I’ve touched on the flatness of our current world before, but this week, standing in that store, seeing these devices collectively rather than individually, the depthless uniformity became glaringly apparent to me. The Apple Store with its LED white light strips any depth or warmth from the machines, that they might come to possess in a more personal context.
Divorced from the domestic habitat, these screens, keyboards, phones, and iPads, collectively present something insidious. The anodized colours, the uniformity, the conformity—they feel like an imposition. It’s as if their aesthetic dictates not just how we use technology but how we perceive and navigate our lives.
A life where spontaneity and the rough edges that make us human are edged out in favor of an existence that mirrors the devices we carry. Beautiful on the surface, on the inside empty and increasingly flat. The messiness of life smoothed over.
What I was seeing around me felt less like a coherent design language and more like a kind of aesthetic fascism. A rigid, unyielding conformity that only reveals itself when these devices are seen together in the controlled environment of the store. Rather than scattered throughout the personalised chaos of our lives.
This feeling isn’t new, I realise. It first crept up on me during a lecture I gave on the history of computing at a university recently. Standing in front of a room full of students, each one behind a space-grey laptop, faces illuminated only by the bright glow of their screens—it was a sea of sameness, dystopian. There was something unsettling about it the way these devices erased individuality in favour of a sleek, anonymous sameness. The device came before the person.
I feel an urge to rebel, to disrupt this aesthetic conformity. I’ve always put stickers on my laptops—my old machines were plastered with them—but with my latest model, the M2, I haven’t bothered. Now, though, it feels like an act of defiance. A small, personal stand against the creeping aesthetic hegemony. A way to reclaim a bit of individuality in a world that’s pressing us all into the same mould.
It’s funny—what made those early Macs so refreshing was their burst of personality in a world of beige and black technology. Their pastel-coloured, translucent designs were marketed to us as statements of individuality and creativity.
Waiting in the Apple Store, I couldn’t help but feel like something vital has been lost. The machines are still beautiful, still marvels of engineering, but they’ve been drained of something essential, replaced by a sterile, corporate perfection. Each device, flawless in its execution, feels like a cog in a much larger Apple machine. Looming monoliths of grey and silver instead of insidious black.
Maybe this is the price of progress, but I can’t shake the feeling we’ve sacrificed something important. I find myself longing for the good old days, when technology felt more human, more tactile, and rough around the edges. When buttons had a satisfying click, and screens were pixelated. When every device in a room was different, and you could pick out someone’s laptop or phone from across the room. Now, everything is smooth, polished, and identical—beautiful, sure, but too perfect.
So I think I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to dig out my box of stickers and start decorating my laptop. It’s a small gesture, but having an ‘Enya Fans 4 Communism’ sticker on my laptop feels like a necessary start.
A way to reclaim a sense of playfulness, to make the tool I spend more time with than actual, real, people, a little more my own. A rebellion. Because these devices aren’t just machines—they’re extensions of our lives, and they should reflect that.
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