Today I went to Meadow Hall Centre which is shopping centre based in Sheffield and I spotted they had one of these so called “Apple Stores” – so I ventured in. The Store reminded me of a mobile phone store with products laid out on tables, chained to the desk and people playing with them with the odd person walking around asking if you wanted any help. This would be a good time for me to have a play with all the apple products and see them in the flesh. Would I pull my wallet out and by something or would I walk away laughing to myself that people pay so much for these things?
The iPad
First on my list (and closest to the door – so they know what sells) was the iPad. It was a lot smaller than I expected and of course as a lot of poeple have rubbed there hands across these things, they were very dirty indeed. They had various demo apps installed to let you see what it could do and I shall be honest here, had I thought “I could use this” I may have bought one at some stage but no people, it was nothing more than a gimmick to me – a rather large iPod if you like. Had it been say £300 – I may have been tempted but starting at £429 is not my idea of a impulse buy item.
iMac 27″
I had someone expected the screen to look bigger than it was, after all it was 27″ right? Maybe as the OS has large icons and lack of items on the desktop (bar the dock) – I never got the sense of “wow – this is big”. If I remember rightly – the Core i7 model was a staggering £1794 and once again, it was not something I pressed and messed about with and said “WoW – this is quick”. I agree though that the short time spent shopping was not a length of time to test and assess the speed of the said apple but whatever – the price people is just too much for what you get – seriously.
Various Apple goods
The router, the mouse, the keyboard, the cases and other things – one point here, they cost money, a lot more than the same products from other people. There was fair few people in the store but not a single person at the till buying anything that I could see. My Guess is people seen the flashy store and wanted to play with the iPad, I even seen various Mac computers with nobody on them. I left and headed off to look for some proper hardware at normal prices and sensible priced software 
