Sixty minutes in an Apple store
More focus aerobics
—The store is immense, airy, somewhat ghostly.
—The ceiling is mirrored and very high above my head, tall enough to allow for two rows of eight bayrum trees, themselves quite tall, shading the computers and phones.
—I’m reminded of better airport gates, how high ceilings make people calmer, whereas low ceilings can feel antagonizing and seem to increase impatience, trapping anxiety like smog.
—At ten a.m., the store is mostly empty. I count 22 employees carrying phones or tablets, wearing blue T-shirts and blue jackets.
And to be clear, though I planned on doing another “sixty minutes” this week, I did not plan on doing it in an Apple Store in central Los Angeles. But then the delete key stopped working on my seven-year-old MacBook Air—the third key to quit in the last year—and a decision was made.
—A pleasant-seeming young woman with a microphone, standing in front of a large screen, is performing an iPhone tutorial for an audience of nobody.
—A pleasant young woman named Katharine sells me a new laptop. She asks at one point, “So, what do you with your MacBook?” A few minutes later, she hands me off to a pleasant middle-aged man named Scott. We sit at a long wooden table, so he can help me move the contents from the old laptop to the new one. A timer on my screen says the transition will take nineteen hours. Scott says it’ll go down—it’ll likely be more of a two-hour wait.
“So, what do you with your MacBook?” he asks.
—Customers are all ages, all races. An older woman named Molly, with long white hair and an open expression, sits diagonally across from me, next to a goateed man in glasses, who will help her move the contents from an old tablet to a new one.
“What do you with your iPad?” he asks.
“Oh, watch television, or listen to music,” she says. “What sort of music do you like?”
“Kinda everything,” he says. “Right now mostly Devo.”
“My husband used to manage Devo!” Molly exclaims brightly.
“What? That’s insane,” the man says.
“Oh, we used to have marvelous times,” Molly says. “Devo, you know, they were all very, very smart.”
—The woman with the microphone starts a new tutorial, on how to make your own emoji. Her audience is a pair of adults and a young girl, maybe eight or nine years old. The woman asks the girl what kind of emoji she’d like to make.
“A sad one,” the girl says.
—I watch the timer tick and think about how Apple has made a very complicated, multi-stage, technological and mercantile experience somehow extremely smooth. The mood is light. The music is good. I wonder if I might ask for a coffee.
—A wiry man sits down across from me, talking to himself, carrying a backpack and a “strawbango”-flavored energy drink. He looks strung out, possibly fifty, or possibly thirty. The tattoos are extensive. His nails are chipped, painted black. Around his neck is a dirty laminated badge on a lanyard that says “TMZ CELEBRITY TOURS VIP.”
The man’s backpack is enormous, stuffed full. He pulls out a tablet with a cracked screen, plugs it in, then pulls out a large orange comb and a small container of Vicks VapoRub.
Several people notice he’s talking to himself. I notice Molly watching him closely.
Regarding the man’s appearance: The sides and back of his head are shaved bald while the hair on top is long, bleached blond, and glued back—something that can be achieved, I witness, by combing it through with goops of Vicks VapoRub, which the man does methodically for the next five minutes, occasionally laughing or talking to himself, before tying a red bandanna around his forehead.
Done with his hair, the man attempts to turn on his tablet. The screen remains dark. None of this seems to discourage him. “Well, hello there,” he says gently, smiling at his screen, tapping on the reflection of his face.
—The woman doing the presentation announces that anyone making their own emoji today gets to take it with them when they leave.
“You get to take your emoji when you leave?” the man muses quietly, then stands up and approaches the presenter.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he says. “Do I get to take my emoji home with me when I leave?”
“Absolutely you can,” she says.
“That’s cool, thank you,” he says. He stands there a moment staring at the sad emoji on the screen, then returns to our table.
My timer is down to an hour and a half.
—Molly, the older woman sitting at our table, approaches the man across from me. He stops talking to himself as she approaches, as though feeling nervous or afraid.
“Excuse me for saying this, but I love your outfit,” Molly says.
“Ah geez, that’s nice,” the man says.
He’s wearing black track pants, red Nikes, and a red and gold sports jersey.
“Can I take a picture of you?” Molly asks. “I just really like your look.”
“I don’t feel very good today,” he says quietly.
“Oh, but you look great! What’s your name?”
“Chelsea.”
“Chelsea, what a nice name. I’m Molly. Here, why don’t you pose for me?”
Chelsea stands and Molly directs him through several poses, as though for a fashion shoot—arms folded across his chest, then one hand in his pocket, then a thoughtful face, then a big smile. At first he’s reluctant, but he quickly gets into it.
She asks for his number so she can text him the pictures.
“I don’t have a phone,” Chelsea says.
“How about email?”
“I don’t use email,” he says. “I retired five years ago, I got divorced, moved out here. Every time I go to get a phone, something happens.”
“What’s that badge around your neck?”
“I work for TMZ,” he says.
“Oh, I thought you were retired?” she says. “What’s TMZ?”
“Paparazzi stuff,” he says.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Molly says, laughing. “Well, let me show you how good you look,” she adds, then puts on her reading glasses, and the two of them spend a minute swiping through photos on her phone.
“I’m telling you, Chelsea, you look so good today,” Molly says.
“You’re a very nice person,” he says.
—The goateed man working with Molly needs her attention, something to do with her new tablet, and Chris needs my attention, something to do with my new laptop. The woman doing the emoji tutorial finishes and congratulates the girl in the audience on her beautiful work. “I love how emotional it is!” she says.
Chelsea puts on a pair of headphones, resumes talking to himself, and strolls around the store, inspecting products. The headphones cord dangles by his side, plugged into nothing.
I leave with my laptop shortly later, thinking there are worse places to spend an hour than an Apple store in central Los Angeles.
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Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For books, articles, bio, and contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.