Apple in the Big Apple

Stepping into an Apple store is the closest thing in retail to heaven--not just all the cool hardware but a bright, comforting whiteness like that described by the near-dead. Apple’s new Big Apple megastore, which opened on Friday night, combines this experience with Manhattan chic. Its location should make New York City photographers especially happy: It’s on the corner of 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, right on the edge of the meatpacking district our ilk has taken over.

The new store--America’s largest after the one in Chicago--consumes far more space than it really seems to need. (That’s the true measure of chic in otherwise cramped Manhattan.) And its 1920s Arts and Crafts building is in fact the first three-level Apple store, its trademark spiral glass stairway winding all the way up to a third floor devoted entirely to service. (The first floor has computers, the second iPods, iPhones, and related third-party accessories.) The “genius bar” on the third floor is almost fifty feet long, tended by a good portion of the store’s 175 employees. The hope is that the usual service backlog bemoaned by Apple enthusiasts can be avoided.

The store will be open every night until midnight, good for late-working New Yorkers. In fact, I’ll probably be going back sooner than I expected, because my daughter’s new iPod has just inexplicably frozen up...

--Russell Hart