I went to an Apple store to see the iPhone 13 and it wasn’t sold at all

I explained that I was interested in the new iPhone.

“Here they are all,” he said, quite cheerfully.

“Can you tell me why I should buy one?” ” I asked. “Right now I have an iPhone 12.”

You are a pro. I can say.

“It’s the 13 over there,” he offered slightly dismissively, still allowing me to take a quick glance. “But you should look at the 13 Pro.”

Then, instead of getting excited about the Pro’s qualities from his own heart, he chose to grab one of the other phones, scroll down to the comparison page, and start reading. With all the enthusiasm of a vicar declaiming the benefits of salvation to an empty church.

He seemed most moved by the adaptive refresh rate that came with ProMotion. At least his promotion was livelier than his monotony that the A15 chip was better than the A14, with better battery life and the camera letting me suddenly fly all over Hollywood.

“If you like that stuff,” he said.

He insisted, however, that 5G is a wonderful thing that he enjoys all the time. Which does not seem to correspond to most analyzes of his current abilities.

I asked if the phone would really maintain its speed over time.

“Well the thing is you think it’s slowing down, but it’s just that the other phones that come out after are faster,” he explained, as if that’s what got me going. had missed.

I then tried a question that tormented me, in a very minor way.

“Why are the cameras on the back of 13 now diagonal?” I asked.

“It’s purely aesthetic,” he replied, with sheer indifference.

Think Indifferent.

I always thought it was odd, in a store that was certainly not crowded, not to witness the highly alert, level Apple enthusiasm that so often emanates from the store staff.

In the past, even when I’ve openly said I owned the phone from the previous year, sellers have consistently presented new phones and themselves with relaxed abandon and open encouragement to upgrade.

I could appreciate that the Pro had prettier and brighter edges. After you’ve enjoyed the dull qualities of 12 for a year, your shallow side – big, in my case – yearns for change.

“So why did you switch from your 12 Pro to your 13 Pro?” I asked him, because he had suggested that that was what he had done.

“Oh, I’m on the annual upgrade program,” he replied.

“You can certainly sell me on that,” I thought.

But by this point – and it may have only been a four-minute conversation so far – he had started looking out the door, then over my head to the inside part of the store.

I imagined he had other customers waiting. I imagined he had already decided that he couldn’t / really wanted to sell me something better.

Then the deeper truth.

“Look, we have people with iPhone 6s, 7s and 8s,” he said. “These are the people who will really want the 13.”

So yes, it looks like I had been marked. Still, he could have very easily sold me, with little effort, at least the upgrade program.

I was in a good mood that morning and I’m the kind of human who often doesn’t move, until someone kindly points me in the right direction.

But then he walked away.

“Don’t hesitate to play,” he said, already on the move.

So good bye.

Did he walk to another client? He does not have. In fact, he went to chat with one of his sales colleagues who was standing a little empty at another table.

Of the very many phone store visits I have made, at least 95% have been extremely pleasant whether I have purchased something or not.

In Apple stores, it was perhaps even an even higher proportion. This measured indifference was therefore strange. It was almost akin to an AT&T store experience I had recently – and quite the opposite of T-Mobile’s on the same day.

Maybe I caught the wrong person at the wrong time and he wasn’t happy to see the phone in my pocket.

Maybe he and his fellow seller had more important things to discuss, like another thrilling San Francisco Giants game.

I have decided that, for now, I can live without the 13 Pro.

However, I walked around on the new iPad Mini and it looked great.