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Apple's recently unveiled store in Palo Alto, California has a mixed impact on the senses -- beautiful to the eyes, complete torture to the ears.
That's right: according to The Guardian, the newest Apple Store, while a pleasure to look at from the outside, is just unbearably loud on the inside.
"The store is impressive. . .but its also unpleasantly, almost unbearably noisy," writes Jean-Louis Gassée. "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."
Poor acoustics seem to be the culprit: the store's arch-style design may be bouncing sound waves from customers, employees and technology right back to shop dweller's ears. And it's pretty bad indeed:
"On a relatively quiet Saturday evening," wrote Gassée, "the noise level around the Genius Bar exceeded 75 decibels."