Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Apple comes to Munich



The photo above in the middle I did actually shoot as the crowd, estimated by police as being around four thousand, chanted a countdown to the ten o'clock opening. The atmosphere was everything one expects from a gathering of the Mac faithful... friendly, open-minded, confident. However there was no way I was going to stand in line for hours and there was equally no way that Wife Two and Daughter were going to surface before lunch-time on a Saturday, so I had the perfect excuse to while away the hours window shopping in down-town Munich.

As Socrates said: "What a lot of things a man doesn't need!"


So it was late afternoon and dark when we finally got into the Apple Store and all agreed that it fully lived up to our hopes. It is a brilliant retailing concept and is certain to be a big success. It prompted a review of our family's Mac history. Oddly it turned out that I have only ever bought four Apple computers.




The first Mac I ever had in '86 or '87 was a 512K passed on to me when a colleague decided to upgrade to an absolutely fantastic SE model! And I followed his advice and bought my own SE in '88, the year our daughter was born. And that purchase was made in Munich, from a shop actually opposite where the Apple Store opened at the weekend.

A second Mac came into my possession in the early 90s, one of the earliest lap-top models, the Colt 45 PowerBook. This was actually a computer rented by the production company I was working for. But when we had wrapped the 22 episodes of the game show's season, the rental company claimed to have no trace of ever providing us with the machine in question. I have it to this day, alas 'bricked'.


Then, when Daughter turned ten, I bought the Blue G3 and a while later the iMac with the hemispherical base for Wife Two to whom I was still sort of married. My fourth Mac purchase was the one Daughter got for her eighteenth.
The story 'till now. Four Macs in twenty years hasn't added much to Apple's profit margin but I think that long-term fidelity counts for something. And... I have never, ever bought a PC!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

really love that post!
but we ARE able to "surface" before lunch :) sometimes...
lots of love