Before the Apple Store, there were the Authorized Resellers

I went to the Apple Store a little while ago. My Macbook Air screen is busted and I wanted to see if they could fix it on quick turnaround. I was pretty sure it was out of warranty but I thought, you know, they got like eight trillion dollars, right? Maybe they’d take pity on me. For good measure I brought in all four of my children, including the newborn, and really tried to put on the air of a weeping, destitute widower, struggling desperately to feed four ravenous mouths by earning my own scrappy way with my humble Apple product.

It didn’t work. “This is out of warranty,” the guy told me, and that ended that. I can’t blame them. They didn’t get those trillions by being suckers. But all in all the Apple Store is really pretty lame, right? It is just so insufferably corporate from top to bottom. Everything is gleaming white, insufferably branded, crisp and right-angled. It feels like stepping into a theme park exhibit of a computer store. Every worker is wearing a crisply ironed blue shirt, they all spend more time tapping and ticking at their work-issued iPhones than they do talking to you, they all speak in about 65% corporate dreck. Perhaps most intolerably, all the employees have to wear those stupid laniards around their necks with ID cards at the end. Why? Why are corporate overlords obsessed with laniards? In every corporate environment, at every symposium or conference, everybody’s gotta wear them. They’re so awful, they’re useless, nobody likes them. Like, what, I’m gonna peer down at your laniard, stupidly squinting at the tiny writing for an awkward twelve seconds, to figure out who you are? What a dumb tradition.

You kids might not be aware of this, but many years ago there was no such thing as an “Apple Store.” Apple itself was a distant monolith, almost half a legend, scarcely believable, more an uncertain concept than an actual corporation. They certainly weren’t running these upper-tech-level “stores” full of laniard-wearing Asian guys and $2.5 million of merch on the shelf. If you wanted an Apple product or Apple support, you didn’t go to Apple. You went to…an Apple Authorized Reseller.

These were not official Apple-supported stores; rather they were independent third-party retailers who had received a corporate indulgence from Apple itself to market its products. For years this was all you had. In the early 90s, if you were among the 700 people in your metropolitan statistical area to have an Apple product, this was the place you went to meet other people like you. It was how you knew you were not alone. It was your respite from the sneering hatred of your friends with Packard-Bells and Compaq Presarios.

And it was great. Like Apple itself in those days, these places were possessed of a sort of improbable duality of both underdoggedness and superior tech. Even in its dark days of sub-10% market share, Apple consumer products were always far better than those of Windows or other PCs. They always have been. Everybody knows this. Even today the biggest criticism that tech nerds can level at Apple is that it’s too proprietary and you can’t customize their hardware to your liking. News flash, nerds: 99% of people don’t want to build a tower from cobbled-together motherboards and fan headers. We want a product that works well and doesn’t suck. There you go.

Apple works, of course—and it worked back then, too, even though its products for years were derided as lame jokes. In that kind of environment, the Authorized Reseller became the technological equivalent of a speakeasy during Prohibition, a secret place you went to indulge in something that the rest of society had stupidly decided to malign. Like speakeasies, they crammed these shops wherever they could, as if they were desperately trying to keep a low profile in case Bill Gates and his Untouchable goons decided to come by and kick in the wooden barrels of Powerbook Duos. The place my father and I used to go to was retrofitted into what I think was a late-19th century carriage house in an alley. It was run by nice guys who liked to talk shop with my dad and liked to show me the newest CD-ROM games that had been released since our last visit. The place was tiny, with a bank of Performas and eventually iMacs lining one short wall, with haphazard shelving built around the computers to house the scant software products you could find for Macs back then.

It was great. It was, I think, indubitably better than the Apple Store, which has almost become a parody of itself, just an extension of Cupertino’s insufferable id, a notional idea of computer ownership brought to life by someone who has never really spent much time in the real world. The Authorized Resellers were just, you know, normal places—places where you’d go and talk to some regular guys about computers, maybe buy a game or a new word processor, see the new models and figure out if you wanted to drop $2900 on it. It didn’t have to be this weird, ethereal experience where someone in a laniard said lame, irritating things like “Genius Bar” and other embarrassing branded phrases. There was a fun sort of rebel quality to it all, of course, and there’s something to be said for that, but beyond that it was just better: Lower-pressure, more human, less robotic, more enjoyable overall.

And no, I’m not just saying all of this because they refused to fix my laptop for free. But, you know, they could have. I’m just saying, they could have.