My bizarre and unexplained experience in an Apple Store

TidBITS Talk
1

So I’m in Miami Beach and stopped into an Apple Store on Lincoln Road to see if their super-fast T3 network would help my Photos problem.

My Internet at home is fast enough for download and streaming, but never faster than 2 Mbps up. And Photos is going to try to upload the whole library to compare with the photos Apple has stored in my iCloud accounts. And Photos does everything sequentially; upload the local library first before downloading all the new photos.

My computer started running very slowly on the Apple Stores network. It was like my computer was trying to do 100 tasks at once.

I packed up, left, walked a block to Starbucks and my Mac Book Pro is back to normal. But why?

Any ideas what Apple could do to customize their router on the open Wi-Fi connection? I know they close ports for sure because they were blocking Internet connections from non-Apple software.

This was the strangest behavior of a personal, owned Apple computer in an Apple Store I had ever seen.

2

When I visit the Apple Store in Berkeley, CA, I often find the Apple Store WiFi quite unresponsive. If I need to use WiFi, I tap into the network of the bookstore next door.

3

Alas, it wasn’t always this way.

Perhaps the slowdown is a response to the kids using the Apple Store as an Internet café and game room?

Although they used to play on the demo machines that are totally tweaked to run much faster on the store display than they will after you buy and take one home.

Not that Apple computers are slow. Apple just tries to make all the circumstances perfect to show off the machine at its best.