353: ‘Shop Different’, With Michael Steeber

The Talk Show With John Gruber

Special guest Michael Steeber joins the show to discuss his new project, The Apple Store Time Machine — an intricately-detailed explorable walkthrough of four of Apple’s original retail stores.

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Links:

• Michael Steeber’s homepage.
• The App Store Time Machine.
• Steeber’s first crack at the idea of recreating original Apple Stores virtually, this one using ARKit last year.
• Tabletops, Steeber’s newsletter.
• Steeber’s Apple Store Glossary.
• A 4-minute video from the grand opening of the Glendale Galleria Apple Store on 19 May 2001. Apple opened its first two stores that day — in Glendale, California and Tysons, Virginia. Customers waited for three hours to enter the store and were happy to do so.
• Signage outside the Lincoln Park Apple Store in Chicago, with “Apple Store” anachronistically set in Apple Garamond.
• Apple Marina Bay Sands, in Singapore. Just gorgeous.
• Apple Carnegie Library, in Washington, DC.
• Apple Tower Theatre, in Los Angeles.
• Apple Walnut Street, in always-sunny Philadelphia.
  • Walnut Street ransacked and burned during the George Floyd riots on 30 May 2020.
  • My Instagram photo of the employee-painted mural coming to life on the boarded-up Walnut Street Apple Store, 13 June 2020. (Original JPEG, for posterity after Facebook collapses.)
  • The finished mural.
• Bill Gates’s apparently apocryphal quote that “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.