Apple has spent decades perfecting retail. The store layout, the Genius Bar, the specialist training. Harvard Business School has been teaching it as a case study since 2002. When Apple knows what a product is for, its staff know too. The iPhone pitch took thirty seconds. A thousand songs in your pocket. The Apple Watch took three years to find its pitch, but once it did (a health monitor on your wrist), the stores knew what to say.
According to a book by Noam Scheiber, retail employees were flown to Cupertino for secretive training sessions involving NDAs and confiscated phones. Many returned to their stores having spent as little as twenty minutes with the device before leading four-hour workshops to train their colleagues, who then had to run 30-minute customer demos with whatever preparation they could manage. Some were unknowingly showing customers blurry content because nobody had caught the fitting errors during training.
That's not a staffing problem. It's a company that hadn't figured out what to say about its own product.
That's not a staffing problem. It's a company that hadn't figured out what to say about its own product.
Scheiber notes that when Apple Watch launched in 2015 to disappointing sales, store employees helped identify its potential as a health and fitness tool and fed that insight back to Cupertino. The product found its pitch partly because the people selling it had time to figure it out. With Vision Pro, few employees could afford the device even with their staff discount.
Vision Pro's pitch has become more crystallized if you've been paying attention. It's the device your company buys, not the one you buy yourself. The device that car manufacturers use to review designs before they're built, that surgical teams use for training, that aerospace engineers use for simulation. Apple just hasn't said it out loud yet. And until it does, the stores won't know what to say either.