I had no idea. Don’t get me wrong — some of it I expected or even predicted.1 Did everyone turn into movie critics when panther released? Okay, so they probably did. Maybe I just repressed it.
Here’s something a little tiny bit less dramatic; the release itself. Not the software, mind you, I’m talking about standing outside of an Apple Store waiting for 6:00 PM local time and making small wagers with the nearby Mac-ites about what lame melodrama a couple of the employees will do this year thinking they’re clever.2 Anyone who guessed they’d just blare Eye of the Tiger really loudly as they opened the door won some slightly weathered Panther dog-tags from the person next to them.
I was there with a friend — our respective Fiancés stared mockingly at us from the top floor for a couple minutes, then ran off. There’s a tradition of sorts at these things — spot the posers. Why someone would pretend to be a Mac user is beyond me, but there they are anyway. Even the techies look like Mac-using techies; we must have an aura or something. A couple years ago, that same friend and I were walking into the very same Apple Store when I wondered aloud whether I was looking more and more like a Mac-user by the day; my hair was pretty long at the time.
Anyway, this Friday one of the “employees” really stuck out. I thought he was swaggering way too much; like a roadie who is in it to look important setting up for the band, rather than for love or money. My friend thought it was rather odd that he had an iPod Shuffle and regular iPod hanging on a cord around his neck. You don’t really think people work at an Apple Store because they pay well, do you?
The one thing I really didn’t get was the other people in the mall. It’s 5:45 PM on a Friday night, the Apple Store is the only store in the mall that’s closed, there’s a line of people in front of it, and you have neither a Mac nor an iPod; do you really think that when you ask us what we’re waiting for, it’ll be something you care about? Sheesh!
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Granted, my prediction was subject to my NDA with the Apple developer program — so there’s no record of this anywhere. ↩
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For Panther, and I swear I’m not making this up, two idiots burst out of the stairwell at one end of the mall a couple minutes before opening, one of them carrying cheap briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Sure, I believe you crammed the many dozens of boxed copies of the OS into a briefcase and set them up all over the store in two minutes without mangling them all — really. ↩