Jean-Louis Gassée Minding The (Apple)Store:
The store is impressive but it’s also unpleasantly, almost unbearably noisy. And mine isn’t a voice in the wilderness. The wife of a friend walked in, spent a few minutes, and vowed to never return for fear of hearing loss. She’d rather go to the cramped but much more hospitable Stanford store.
A few days later, I heard a similar complaint from the spouse of an Apple employee. She used to enjoy accompanying her husband to the old Palo Alto store, but now refuses because of the cacophony.
Apparently Apple’s newest Palo Alto store has a noise problem. According to Gassée Apple is aware of the issue. They were using an SPL recorder and employees wearing omnidirectional sound recorders to gather data when he went there to see hear for himself.