While the old store — filled with T-shirt racks, shelves of souvenirs and primary colors at every turn — looked like a gift shop, the new store sports a sleeker, more modern look that feels much more like Apple's other retail stores. Carefully arranged displays of Beats headphones, iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands line the walls while the center of the store is dedicated to display cases of the Apple Watch.
The souvenirs have changed too. While previously you could buy everything from keychains to baby onesies to baseball caps to rain jackets, the store now features only a handful of items: a few T-shirts, ceramic mugs, reusable water bottles, notebooks and blank cards.
Gone are the brightly colored tchotchkes, keychains and many shirts with cheeky sayings (e.g "I visited the Apple Campus. But that's all I'm allowed to say.")
But Apple resisted that powerful pull from the past and filled the store instead with what it is today -- a media and technology powerhouse that also knows how to roll out the welcome mat to guests.
I walked through my house again, but this time, I took out my iPhone, opened the Watch app, and continuously adjusted the Alert Volume to create an audible “alert ping” from the Watch. And after a few steps in my garage, I heard it and saw it laying next the compost bin.
I found my Apple Watch. Whew.
Extra RAM and a better color gamut help make up for year-old guts.
With photos, you’ll need to browse through your new camera roll to see if everything came over. That’s because Google Photos, Carousel from Dropbox, or other cloud-enabled photo apps will sometimes delete pictures from your device in order to save space.
I doubt this ambiguity in quotation marks will cause the wailing and gnashing of teeth that the iOS 7 & 8 Shift key did, because few people bother with the quote mark popups, but it’s a similar issue. Because the iOS keyboard relies on visual cues, those cues must be strong enough to be seen at a glance. I like the look of San Francisco’s opening and closing quotation marks, but they don’t provide strong cues.
Google, Apple and Microsoft all have agents that want to be your personal assistant. But how well Google Now, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana can predict your needs depends on how much you want to share, how wedded to particular platforms you want to be and, in some cases, how much you actively want to help make those predictions happen.
Casio released a calculator and Amazon released a tablet within 24 hours of each other this week. That alone is unremarkable. One costs $220, the other costs $50. That, too, wouldn’t raise many eyebrows, until you realize which is which.
— Nick Turner (@SFNick) September 19, 2015
Thanks for reading.