James Kendrick noted this little detail when he bought a new iPhone at the Apple Store yesterday:
The most interesting part of the entire purchase process was seeing the role that Microsoft played in every single iPhone purchase at the Apple store. You see, Apple doesn’t use cash registers or even Macs for the purchase process. No, they use handheld wireless devices made by Symbol, maker of such things, and every single one of them is running the Windows CE operating system. That’s right, Apple had to turn to Microsoft for a point-of-sale (POS) solution solid enough to work under such volume sales situations. These Symbol devices used barcode scanning to input each iPhone’s serial number and other information, used a credit card scanner to accept customer payment, and tapped a wireless connection to not only the Apple store’s network but to the AT&T network to activate the new service for the customer.
Without resorting to snark, I think this illustrates the fundamental difference between Apple, a seller of luxury consumer products, and Microsoft, a developer of business and consumer platforms.
Yes, I know that the current CW is that the iPhone is the new platform, and that might be true. But let’s come back in a year or two and see just how successful the platform really is.
And yeah, I realize that Macs don’t blue-screen… they black-screen! That makes it waaaaaay better. They also don’t include the requisite information to investigate and resolve the issue. At least Windows BSODs give you the info you need to fix the problem.