Nervous wait for an Apple junkie in need of an iFix

DAMIAN THOMPSON
August 12, 2010

The new Apple Store in London's Covent Garden - a magnificently restored Palladian building dominated by a glass-covered courtyard - is designed to offer shoppers the most refined and beautiful retail experience in the world. But Terence, a middle-aged gentleman with wonky specs, sporting a scrappy beard and khaki shorts, wasn't enjoying himself.

He was 20 minutes late for his appointment at the Genius Bar, the support desk where, in Apple Stores all over the world, customers having technical difficulties with their beloved MacBooks, iPhones or iPads hang on the every word of geeks in cool T-shirts.

Terence had to join the back of the queue while all around him clean-cut Apple users gazed deep into the screens of computers that, unlike his poor laptop, weren't broken.

The misery in the queue for the Genius Bar tells us a lot about Apple's hold over its customers. Legs were crossed and uncrossed twitchily. We're definitely talking about some form of addiction here.

Ten years ago, Apple Macintosh made the expensive computers that the cool people used. The egg-shaped iMac G3, for example, proclaimed that you were a graphic designer living in a loft apartment in San Francisco. Or might be one day. But if you wanted to save money, or if you were a serious tech nerd who thought gushing over translucent turquoise plastic was lame, not cool, you could safely dismiss ''the cult of Apple''.

Then came the iPod. This was the first Apple product that blew its rivals out of the market. Its minimalist design and groovy clickwheel made other portable media players look tinny, fussy and overdesigned. And the way it synched with Apple's iTunes online music and video store was so neat and effortless that it didn't feel like a commercial transaction.

By the middle of the last decade, every Apple product release became a media event. The arrival of a new operating system became a topic of water-cooler conversation among people who, a couple of years earlier, didn't know or care what an operating system was.

It may be true that - as has been claimed - Apple chief executive Steve Jobs regards ordinary customers as ''bozos''. If so, then we bozos should be grateful. He knows our secret: that, however clever we think we are, if there's a way of misunderstanding an instruction manual we'll find it. He lightens the burden of installation by dumping it on his engineers and designers, setting ever-higher standards of user-friendliness.

''As you enter an Apple Store, you can feel yourself being taken by the hand,'' says a friend of mine. ''And when you get your device home, you know you won't spend the next two hours losing your temper on the carpet, tripping over cardboard boulders in a tangle of wires.''

Work is replaced by play. The only delay in setting up an iPad is arranging mobile phone access - something I persuaded the salesman to do for me in the shop, so anxious was I to start customising this luxurious tablet computer. That's another deep impulse that Apple understands: the urge to make our devices our own. It's the technological equivalent of staying in a luxury hotel.

And, once again, a tasteful veil is drawn across the transfer of large amounts of money.

Anyone who has studied addiction will recognise two troubling features of our obsession with this technology: the replacement of people by things, which lies at the heart of all addiction, and a tendency for the phenomenon to accelerate. Is it really healthy for us to fall deeper and deeper in love with communications technology that, ironically, creates ever-smarter digital substitutes for face-to-face conversations?

Another friend of mine calls Apple fans ''the living dead''. As in the movie, more people slowly reveal themselves to be zombies, albeit talkative ones. (''If you get the 3G you don't need a wireless connection! And have you seen this app?'')

A trip to the new Apple Store doesn't do much to dispel this impression. There is a look of glazed wonder in the eyes of visitors - including a party of Hasidic Jews - playing with an iPad for the first time.

Quite troubling, really. But then, I've already bought mine.

Damian Thompson is editor of blogs for London's Daily Telegraph.