What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death

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Apple Shifts From Genius Bars to Genius Groves, Hoping Patrons Linger

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Goodbye, Apple Genius Bar. You are being replaced by a tree-filled Genius Grove, which will have more room to sit and more Apple customer service specialists to troubleshoot devices.

“We didn’t want it to feel like a store. We wanted it to feel like a town square — very open, and everyone invited,” Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail and online stores, told reporters invited to Thursday’s preview.

The idea, Ms. Ahrendts said, is to make the Apple store a destination, not just a place to shop.

“We want people to say, ‘Meet me at Apple,’” she said. With more open space and places to sit, including wooden cubes and large leather medicine balls, customers will be able to linger.


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Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are making calculated bets that intelligent personal assistants are the future… The most obvious similarity among many digital personal assistants is that they sound like women, even though our robot friends are decidedly gender neutral… Many of these helper bots also have distinctly feminine voices to go along with their girly names.



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In an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson explained that physical retail was so much more about an experience than a crude sales channel.

 “The Apple store’s a place to be,” Johnson said. Not a place to shop, a place to be.

He also offered one bracing statistic (around the 38-minute mark): “Only 1 out of the 100 who visit the store every day buy anything.”

He then put forward this conundrum: “But it’s the busiest store in the mall.”

What are the other 99 doing? Bathing in the connection between themselves and the brand. In the future, he said, stores will be forced to create more intimacy through their physical stores.

The ubiquity of technology has meant that people feel more connected to each other — although one can debate how real these connections are.