Lunch at Apple

Caught up with an old high school teacher for lunch on Friday. He left the school in the same year I finished to work for Apple, so I drove up to Apple’s Australia HQ in French’s Forest to meet him. Back in school they had these old Mac SEs and other assorted Apple paraphrenalia. I always used to trash Macs whenever I got the opportunity (I still do :). It was good when they switched over to Pentium-166MXes because that meant we could occasionally play Quake during lunchtime.

Anyway, Apple has grown leaps and bounds over the last five years. I still enjoy bagging out
Macs because, well, they’re Macs and they only have one mouse button. Nonetheless, Apple’s industrial design is second-to-none in the computing industry. Although the Apple HQ is pretty much just a corporate venue, the reception area is decked out like an Apple store with a range of Powerbooks, iMacs and so on on display just begging to be played with and touched (and they can be). I got a brief tour of the place and there isn’t much there, but it very much has a dot-commy feel to it. Techies in jeans, funky furniture, weird walls, crazy chairs and lots of translucency. The call centre there, which handles tech support for the Asia-Pacific region is called the “green room”. The floor is done in a lime green (garish or soothing, it’s a matter of opinion) and the walls are ceiling-to-floor blackboards. Not a CRT to be seen.

My eyes lit up when I got to play with what was alleged to be the first and only non-imported Mini iPod currently in Australia (its April release date was delayed). It’s tiny. It’s sexy. It’s cool. It’s fun to use. I want one. Unfortunately, for someone a poor uni student like me, just a bit too pricey (especially compared with the 15GB model) to justify forking out that much cash for it. I was assured that Apple was in fact making very slim margins on the iPods, but if you want to be cynical, I guess this is counteracted by the limited battery life of them requiring a repurchase after a year or two.

Shish, he says hi to you as well.

  11:59pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •   •  Tweet This  •  Comments (3)