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Ever wonder why the staff at Apple (AAPL) retail stores is so effective at moving the merchanise? Alex Frankel has some answers. He took a leaf from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and spent two years working undercover in entry level jobs at a series of national chains, among them UPS (UPS), the Gap (GPS), the Container Store, Home Depot (HD), Starbucks (SBUX) and finally Apple.

The result is a book called Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Frontline Employee. It's due out from Harper Collins Nov. 20, but from the taste of it published in Fast Company, it's clear he rates Apple above the rest.

A sampler:

Once on staff, I learned the difference between a gigahertz and a gigabyte, but more important, I saw that, like the iPod's user interface, training of Apple Store employees has been carefully designed. A series of podcasts I listened to and watched showed that selling was all about the approach. I shadowed other workers as they executed the company's three-step sales process. They explained to customers that they had some questions to understand their needs, got permission to fire away, and then kept digging to ascertain which products would be best. Position, permission, probe.

All this sets the employee's on-the-job attitude. At an Apple Store, workers don't seem to be selling (or working) too hard, just hanging out and dispensing information. And that moves a ridiculous amount of goods: Apple employees help sell $4,000 worth of product per square foot per month. When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond…. (link)

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How did Leopard sell?

Very well indeed. In a press release issued this morning, Apple (AAPL) announced that it had sold or delivered more than 2 million copies of OS X 10.5 in its first weekend on the market. OS X Tiger, by comparison, took nearly six weeks to reach the 2 million mark. That makes the launch of Leopard the most successful OS release in Apple's history.

"These numbers show the Mac user base is growing," writes PiperJaffray's Gene Munster. "It also shows that it is an unusually active user base, with 9% of the approximately 23 million users upgrading in the first four days." He notes that there were half as many Macs in circulation in April 2005 when Tiger was released, yet it took Tiger nearly ten times as long to reach 2 million sales.

Comparative sales figures for Microsoft's (MSFT) Vista operating system were not immediately available, but the company is said to have licensed 20 million copies in its first month, a number Leopard is unlikely to surpass. But that's comparing apples and oranges, given the relative size of their respective user bases. Last week Microsoft reported that it had sold 88 million copies of Vista in nine months, representing less than 9% of the worldwide installed base of roughly 1 billion Windows machines.

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It's been two months since Apple (AAPL) and NBC Universal (GE) broke up over video pricing on iTunes, but the wounds don't seem to have healed — at least for Jeff Zucker.

Variety reports today that NBC's CEO let loose on Apple in a breakfast interview with The New Yorker's Ken Auletta at Syracuse University. Zucker claims that NBC — Apple's single largest video partner — made only $15 million in iTunes sales in the past year. That's about 1/3 of what outsiders had estimated and far less than the entertainment giant is used to pulling in from hit properties like The Office and 30 Rock.

"We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side," he said, according to Variety.

But in describing the negotiations that led to an impasse in August, Zucker repeated claims that Apple has already contradicted, specifically:

• that NBC Universal represented 40% of Apple's iTunes video content (Apple claimed in a press release it was only 30%)
• that its demands were modest: to raise the price of one show — any show — from $1.99 per episode to $2.99 (Apple claimed NBC wanted to hike the per-episode cost to $4.99)

Zucker also suggested that NBC was asking for something Steve Jobs is unlikely to give any media partner: a cut of his iPod sales.

"Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money," Zucker said. "They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing." (link)

NBC's iTunes contract with Apple expires in December and from the tenor of Zucker's remarks, renewal doesn't seem likely. “We know that Apple has destroyed the music business – in terms of pricing – and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side,” he told the breakfast audience, according to FT.com.

NBC and News Corp., meanwhile, are set to launch Hulu.com, their bid to offer studio-produced video on the Web that's supported, like broadcast TV, with advertising. Hulu is handing out beta subscriptions here, if you want to give it a try.

See What iTunes Looks Like Without NBC and Apple to NBC: Drop Dead

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Most consumers thinking about buying Apple's (AAPL) new Leopard operating system will learn what they need to know from the first wave of reviews — the ones written by journalists who were given pre-loaded, pre-release copies of OS X 10.5 and had a week to play with it.

But the review that programmers were waiting for was the one by fellow developer John Siracusa, the Ars Technica columnist who wrote the definitive assessments of the previous five versions of OS X — and has been described as the guy who should be in charge of Finder development at Apple.

Siracusa took careful notes at the Apple developers conferences and has been living with Leopard since the first seed was released. His review came out on Sunday, and it's a doozy — long, deep, painstaking detailed, and unafraid to call 'em like he sees 'em.

He lays out his criteria right at the top:

And as I see it, operating system beauty is more than skin deep. While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard's worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple's web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what's really changed.

These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they're based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user. (link)

True to his word, Siracusa gives us two reviews — a user's view of the look and feel of the OS and a developer's view of the stuff going on under the hood.

The stuff under the hood gets high marks. The terms that come up over and over are "sensible," "pragmatic" and "compromise." A typical summary graph:

The minimal, almost humble way Core Animation integrates with Cocoa belies its incredible sophistication. More so than any other new framework in Leopard, Core Animation provides functionality and performance that was previously difficult or impossible for the average Cocoa programmer to create on his own. Now, finally, third-party applications can look as impressive as Apple's, and they can do so by using exactly the same code that Apple's using—code written by expert graphics programmers and continually revised and improved by Apple to take advantage of the latest hardware. Excellent.

About the hood itself, he's not so kind. A hard taskmaster when it comes to user interfaces, Siracusa faults Apple again and again for choosing flash over usability. He sums up the problem — and speculates about its source — in two damning paragraphs:

Leopard's new look has been compared to the Aero Glass look in Windows Vista. While I think there are few legitimate similarities, this comparison comes up as often as it does because the two designs share one prominent attribute: the gratuitous, inappropriate use of translucency to the detriment of usability.

Why, Apple? Why!? Was there something horribly wrong with the existing menu bar—something that could only be fixed by injuring its legibility? Like the folder icons and the Dock, it's not so much a fatal flaw in and of itself. It's what it implies about the situation at Apple that is so troubling. What in the holy hell has to happen in a meeting for this idea to get the green light? Is this the dark side of Steve Jobs's iron-fisted rule—that there's always a risk that an obviously ridiculous and horrible idea will be expressed in his presence and he'll (inexplicably) latch onto it and make it happen? Ugh, I don't even want to think about it.

Even if you never wrote or hope to write a line of code, you'll learn a lot about Apple, its operating systems and the future of Macintosh applications from reading Siracusa. Highly recommended.

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Apple (AAPL) just released OS X 10.5 Leopard, but a team of programmers has already figured out how to install the new operating system on off-the-shelf Intel PCs. See DailyApps' tutorial here for step-by-step instructions.

The procedure is still experimental and has not been thoroughly tested. Some system preferences, like Sound and Network, may never work.

It's a tour de force nonetheless, one that reminds us of the remark Samuel Johnson made in less enlightened times about women preachers. Like a dog walking on his hind legs, he said, "It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Warning: Using Leopard this way is a violation of Apple's license agreement, which states: "This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time."

[Image courtesy of mac.nub]

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