I stepped into an Apple store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan recently

An Apple a day

I stepped into an Apple store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan recently. It's supposed to be their signature store (not the largest, which is in London) designed by some of the leading architects of the world, and in no show of might, it copies the entrance to the Louvre in Paris. The theory being perhaps that whatever is inside, is perhaps as valuable as what's inside the Louvre, which Apple lovers, will agree with, as perhaps an understatement.

Apple stores have popped up around the world now and display a similar aesthetic. Hip, glass, chrome, white walls, salespeople that look like they draw cartoons but have PhDs and carefully dishevelled hair. They are also the modern Disneyland for adults. It is not so much a store but a playground surrounded by cool-looking sleek things that may have a utility that an old gramophone or TV had, but contained in a thing from the Matrix that makes it okay for adults to feel like 12-year-olds.

What Apple's done to the world is best described in a recent comedy show called Modern Family where a husband has just received a birthday gift from his wife, the new iPad. All night, he sits in the dark, just sliding the touch-screen saying, "I love you". There is no better moment to capture mid-life crisis. In today's world, Apple has replaced the Porsche, the young blonde and the spiky hair-cut for the 45 year-old male.

My interaction with a casual PhD-cartoonist-hipster-salesperson (and they are always amazingly articulate even when they look six years old), went like this, "Um, I am here to buy a cover for an iPad for my friend". "You mean a Dodo pack". "What?" "That's what we call it here, a dodo pack". "OK, yeah, a Dodo pack then".

"You said friend, not for you?" "No, I have a PC".u00a0 This was followed by a long silence, and the weight in that silence was about the same as when, say Nehru, stood on top of a wall in Delhi to announce the Mahatma was no more. And it had the emotional weight in its equal.

The gent merely however, took at that, rage, disappointment and could only manage an "Oh", as he walked away, destroyed. I had a vague idea that the world was broken up into PC and Mac people but I had no idea that when you entered the holy shrine of Apple's Xanadu and you said the unthinkable, the reaction would be a kind of hate that perhaps Osama would feel if he sat for a debate with 9/11 families.

"Here's the Dodo case," said Apple man, as if speaking to his family's killer. "And I don't understand why your friend bought an iPad without the Dodo case, it's just not done" reading as if my friend had participated in apartheid or set fire to a KFC. Realising I was perhaps no longer wanted, I slunk out of the store with the thing, not sure if I was a customer or a criminal.

Stephen Fry, the British comedian, in his introduction to the new iPad suggested that not only has Apple divided the world into believers and non-believers, (The Economist compared Steve Jobs to God, calling the latest gadget, "The Book of Job"), it has also created a world that's changed what a consumer is. Fry says "Apple doesn't ask its customers what they want. It tells you what you will want next".u00a0

And by a natural extension of that, Apple has not created a computer, it has created a way of life. If one was to vastly generalise, if somebody has an iPhone, a Mac book, an iPod, an iPad he/she is possibly artistic, fashionable, edgy, global. The real culture Apple creates is not an i with a hyphen for $400, it's a mindset where everyone says, "I don't care what they bring out or what the thing does (it could be an iBaboon which is an App on the phone), I-Want-To-Be-Like-That is Apple's real product."u00a0