Ever wonder why the staff at Apple (AAPL) retail stores is so effective at moving the merchandise? 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)

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.

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

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.

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]

This was not the smoothest of upgrades.

The first report of trouble installing Apple’s (AAPL) new operating system came from Australia, where Leopard was delivered nearly a day before its U.S. debut. The message, posted on Apple.com’s OS X 10.5 Leopard discussion board, read:

Installation appears stuck on a plain blue screen
Posted: Oct 25, 2007 7:32 PM

I’m upgrading my 20″ iMac (Core Duo) at the moment and the installation ‘completed’, then the computer rebooted and it has been sitting on a plain blue screen for the past 30 minutes.There is no progress indicator of any sort but I can occasionally hear the hard drive seeking. Should I restart my Mac or keep waiting???

Thanks,

Paul

By this morning, the “stuck on a plain blue screen” thread Paul started had grown to 246 messages and been viewed more than 10,000 times. Not everyone who posted was experiencing problems — many of the messages were offers of support and advice — but it appears that dozens (if not many more) would-be Leopard upgraders have run into something akin to what Microsoft (MSFT) Windows owners have come to know as the BSOD (the Blue Screen of Death).

“Not a very good start,” wrote a user who calls himself (or herself) Perapolka.

“Jeez don they test this stuff ?” asked Wingrove.

It’s not clear what’s causing the problems, and according to a report in The Register, Apple’s technical support staff has been getting an earful from frustrated upgraders.

One source of trouble seems to be an app called Application Enhancer. Some users have found relief by deleting it using a tricky UNIX workaround supplied by user Chris McCulloh, who became an instant hero. Others have managed to complete the installation after being advised by Apple tech support to run an Archive and Install.

One Apple developer who ran into similar problems working with pre-release versions of Leopard shared a message he received from the company with the latest seed:

“Archive installs from Tiger to Leopard sometimes will not succeed on Power PC systems if you try to preserve user settings. Please perform an upgrade install or clean install or opt out of preserving user settings to work around this. Intel systems are unaffected.”

UPDATE: On Sunday, with pageviews on Paul’s thread approaching 30,000, Apple posted instructions for how to deal with the problem. See here.

Meanwhile, Fake Steve Jobs has been struggling with his own blue screen issues; see his Secret Diary.

The cold Manhattan drizzle didn’t faze the faithful.

An estimated 400 to 500 sodden die-hard Apple (AAPL) loyalists waited under umbrellas up to three and a half hours outside the company’s flagship Fifth Avenue store for a chance to buy OS X Leopard on its first day of sale.

By the time the doors opened at 6:01 p.m. the line stretched — in places four or five deep — down Fifth Avenue, across 58th Street and all the way to Madison Avenue.

The rain-soaked customers were greeted in full pep-rally style by black-shirted employees who shouted and clapped as the crowd tramped down the glass-enclosed spiral staircase — and then gave them high-fives as they emerged a few minutes later brandishing their shrink-wrapped packages.

First in line was Bob Greenlees, 23, a student at the Cardozo School of Law. He had been waiting since 2:30 in the afternoon and was still as cheerful and excited as a child on Christmas morning.

“I missed the iPhone line because I was in Paris on my honeymoon,” he said, minutes before the doors opened. “But I watched the webcast.”

“That’s my crazy husband,” said Laura Greenlees, who waited outside with Bob’s computer backpack while he completed the purchase. He came out 15 minutes later with a free T-shirt and a $199 Leopard family pack that he said he would share with his wife and his parents.

The store, which is open 24 hours a day, was expected to have sufficient copies of Leopard to supply all comers — but not necessarily T-shirts. Apple had only stockpiled enough for the first 500 customers.

See also The Day of the Leopard and Leopard: The Reviews Are In

More than two years after it was announced, nearly a year and a half after it was shown to developers, and four months after its original spring 2007 due date, the sixth edition of Apple’s (AAPL) flagship Macintosh OS X goes on sale today at 6 p.m. for $129 ($199 for the family-pack).

The authorized reviews are in and they are broadly positive. Boxes containing OS X 10.5 Leopard pre-ordered online have already started to arrive by courier, and according to David Kravets at Wired.com, “BitTorrent tracker sites are churning with the seeding and leeching” of bootleg versions — activity that is expected to stop as soon as the stolen copies can be replaced with shrink-wrapped (and warranty-supported) versions.

And although there were none of the eager buyers camped out overnight in front of Apple retail outlets as there were for the iPhone, crowds are expected to gather as the evening deadline approaches. Tekserve, New York City’s premier Mac reseller before the Apple Stores arrived, has organized a Leopard release party that includes live jazz, iPod nano raffles, a iPod touch for the best Leopard costume, Leopard tote bags and a free Leopard plush toy for all attendees.

Once again, Steve Jobs has whipped the faithful into a frenzy. For weeks, the Apple blogs have been filled with rumors and screen shots and detailed histories of the evolution of key features. Some Apple watchers have already started to list features that were promised in early promotions and dropped from the final release. Unlike Microsoft’s (MSFT) Vista — which was six years in the making — Leopard is expected to be a huge success.

Tomorrow the user reviews will start to come in. Let the praise — and the whingeing — begin.

One could fault Apple (AAPL) for once again handing out advance copies of its new operating system upgrade only to journalists who depend on good relations with Steve Jobs to supplement their income, but let’s skip all that and go straight to the reviews:

Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal (The D Conference)

• Headline: Leopard: Faster, Easier than Vista. Upgrade of Apple’s OS Isn’t Revolutionary, But It Beats Microsoft’s
• Favorite features: For me, the marquee features in Leopard are a new function called Time Machine that automatically backs up your entire computer in the background; two new methods, called Cover Flow and Quick Look, for rapidly viewing the contents of files without opening any programs; and new techniques that allow you to access the files in, and to remotely control, other computers on your network or connected over the Internet with a few clicks and no technical expertise.
• Drawbacks: The menu bar is now translucent, which can make it hard to see the items it contains if your desktop picture has dark areas at the top. The new folder icons are dull and flat and less attractive than Vista’s or their predecessors on the Mac. While Time Machine can perform backups over a network, the backup destination can only be a hard disk connected to a Mac running Leopard. And, on the Web, I ran into one site where the fonts on part of the page were illegible, a problem Apple says is known and rare and that I expect it will fix.
• Bottom line: Leopard isn’t a must-have for current Mac owners, but it adds a lot of value. For new Mac buyers, it makes switching even more attractive.

David Pogue, New York Times: (Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual)

• Headline: Apple Offers New Goodies in Leopard System
• Favorite features: Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, parental controls, more polished Boot Camp, screen sharing, Web Clips, Wikipedia in the Dictionary, blue-screen iChat, invisibility mode
• Drawbacks: Stacks falls short when there are too many files; see-through menus hard to read; occasional glitches with Spaces
• Bottom line: Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner.

Edward C. Baig, USA Today: (Macs for Dummies)

• Headline: Leopard, Apple’s New Operating System, Hits All the Right Spots
• Favorite features: Time Machine, cool video chat, pretty e-mail, a dandy desktop, clipping widgets
• Drawbacks: Boot Camp still doesn’t let you run Windows and OS X simutaneously; it took many hours, and at least one hiccup, to back up a packed iMac.
• Bottom line: Leopard is one cool cat

Simson Garfinkel: Technology Review (NeXTSTEP Programming)

• Headline: MacOS 10.5 offers easy file recovery, effective parental controls, and a host of clever, smaller features.
• Favorite features: Time Machine, Parental Controls, smart folders, Back to My Mac even works behind firewalls, file previews, synced notes, to-do lists, Stacks.
• Drawback: No way to remove a file from a Time Machine backup
• Bottom line: Worth the money if you value having a computer that’s fast and easy to use … But people who are thriftier than I would probably do better to hold off on this update.

Newsweek’s Steve Levy (Insanely Great, The Perfect Thing) did his review as a web video. You can see it here.

Leopard goes on sale Friday, Oct. 26, at 6 p.m. local time. It’s available online and at Apple’s retail stores for $129.

How times have changed.

In 1998, while I was still working for TIME magazine, Andy Grove stopped by to chat with the editors about the wrenching changes the Internet was going to force on the computer industry. Future PCs, he said, wouldn’t be general purpose computers to which networking has been added as an afterthought, but networking machines that also do computing. “The iMac embodies a lot of the things I’m talking about,” Grove said. “Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us.”

I went back to my desk and banged out a one-graph story for Time.com. “Intel chairman Andy Grove,” I wrote, “has seen the future of computing and it is … a Macintosh.”

The next day I got a call from Intel PR. Grove wasn’t particularly happy about the piece, but he was positively livid about the headline that ran above it — ANDY GROVE LOVES HIS MAC — because it implied that the chairman of Intel (INTC) actually owned an Apple (AAPL) computer. We printed a version of the story in the magazine the next week with a different headline, and Intel was mollified — although the next time I saw Grove he smiled and said if I ever did that again he would sue.

I’m reminded of all this by a Q&A I read yesterday with the current CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini. He’s not ashamed to admit that he uses Apple products. In fact, he says,

“My wife and I both have iPhones. My wife came in with a jacket for her phone. She was all excited. It’s a flimsy little thing. It cost $39. It probably cost 6¢ to make.” He adds that he uses a ThinkPad for work and a MacBook Pro for his personal life, including his personal photos and music. (link)

Only nine years have passed, but how times have changed.