Apple's Covid Response Was Extremely…Apple

Hope everyone’s Thanksgiving was great. And that it didn’t kill you.

The Plain View

Deirdre O’Brien knew how bad the novel coronavirus was before the rest of us. As Apple’s head of retail, she was privy in January to the news of a virus in China—and how serious it was. “It was truly amazing to see Apple go into just a crisis management mode,” she says, describing how Apple pulled together its teams in security, health, and safety, as well as outside experts in subjects such as epidemiology. “We quickly determined that we did not have enough good knowledge to continue to feel comfortable operating our stores. And so we decided to shut our stores down. And we also closed down our offices.” The company announced its China shutdown February 1; CEO Tim Cook made the final call. Though Apple wasn’t exactly an outlier—factories and businesses in China were widely shutting down by then—the experience would inform Apple’s retail strategy throughout the crisis. “Those learnings in China, we applied around the world,” O’Brien says, “and you saw that we were one of the first retailers to close our doors across the United States and Europe and other parts of Asia when it was the right time to do so.”

Apple’s 2020 is best viewed on a dual display. On one imaginary monitor, you’d see a montage of engineers, fabs, and factories churning out a new generation of iPhones, upgrading its iPads, and most emphatically, launching a supercharged, battery-sipping class of Macintosh computers. But on another monitor, you’d see closed stores, empty offices, and intense meetings of WFH execs deciding how to change the way the company sells and supports its products while the world was getting sick.

A lot of the responsibility fell to O’Brien, who has been at Apple for 30 years and is now its most powerful woman: In February 2019, she added oversight of physical and online stores to her existing job of senior VP of people—managing the company’s 150,000 employees. In a long interview, the persistently upbeat exec explained to me how the company managed the crisis. It was March 13 when Apple shut down its stores in the US and Europe. On that same day, Apple told its employees to stay home indefinitely. But the message that Cook sent to employees and customers that day had another key piece of information: Apple had reopened all its stores in China.

That set a pattern for a dynamic dance of opening and closing, based on a formula the company developed. “When we reopen our stores, we look at the virus rates in each one of the local communities that we operate in, and of course also the local rules,” says O’Brien. “We’ve become incredibly nimble.” So much so that some observers use Apple’s status in a given area as a signal for how Covid is rising or falling.

Apple also decided to make its own masks, because, well, it’s Apple. Early in the crisis the company donated the millions of N95 masks it had in its inventory (for things such as fire season) to medical facilities. Instead of burdening the system with its replacement needs, Apple tapped its industrial design team to create first a face shield and then its own three-layer mask, a surgical-style face covering with adjustable straps. When I asked O’Brien what makes this thing an Apple mask, she gave me kind of a circular answer: “Because our team designed it, and they did a wonderful job designing it.” You can’t buy an Apple Mask from its online store, so forget it as a stocking stuffer. The Apple Mask isn’t even the one they hand you at the store if you show up bare-faced—that’s a generic face cover. And wearing one isn’t optional. “If they choose not to wear a mask, then we're very happy to serve them online,” says O’Brien.

The stores themselves have evolved to handle the crisis. In some outlets Apple has set up Express Storefronts, a facade of will-call windows where buyers can pick up products without entering the shop. O’Brien is also proud that the one-to-one interactions that typically take place in stores have successfully gone virtual. The product-support “geniuses” as well as the “specialists” (Apple’s term for salespeople) can now serve customers from home. O’Brien says that, more recently, the company has even shifted some of its in-store programs, like the Today-at-Apple sessions, to digital. “So everything that you come to a retail store for, you can find online.”

Will this mean a shift in the way the company operates its 511 stores, even after the pandemic? O’Brien’s predecessor, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts, was less an operational guru than an avatar of fashion and fancy emporia, whose legacy was making Apple stores into "town squares" where people could hang out, listen to music, and soak in good vibes until they pulled out the credit card to buy a new phone or laptop. O’Brien is more in the workaday mold of her boss, Tim Cook. But she now says that, when Covid goes away, Apple stores will remain a place where people hang out. “We absolutely love the stores that we have,” she says.

Indeed, in most of the China stores, the town squares are buzzing again. But in the weeks ahead, US and European customers can expect more Express Storefronts—and probably more closings as the Covid numbers rise.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed a charger—as I do about once a year—and I saw Apple’s store in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan was open. This was one of Apple’s first retail outposts; Steve Jobs himself appeared at the store’s launch. But this time, the security was even tighter than it was when Jobs gave some of us a tour. A security person pointed a temperature gun at my head, checked to see that my appointment was valid, and sent me inside, where I was paired with a specialist. Through our masks, we chatted. She invited me to play with the new iPhones on the table; not wearing gloves, I demurred. The $80 Macbook Air charger arrived, and the specialist completed the sale.

Covid or not, Apple is open for business.

Time Travel

Apple’s venture into masks reminded me of an earlier departure from its wheelhouse—a pizza box. When I wrote about this in my piece on Apple Park for WIRED’s April 2017 issue, the single sentence about the patented pie holder upstaged the story of a $5 billion spaceship and became the talk of social media:

Apple’s answer [to the question of whether the expense is worth it] is that the perfection here will inspire its workforce to match that effort in the product they create, that the environment itself is meant to motivate engineers, designers, and even café managers to aspire for ever-higher levels of quality and innovation. (Francesco Longoni, the maestro of the Apple Park café, helped Apple patent a box that will keep to-go pizzas from getting soggy.) … “We’re amortizing this in an entirely different way,” [Jony] Ive says. “We don’t measure this in terms of people. We think about it in terms of the future.”

Ask Me One Thing

Adam writes, “It seems that many conservatives are leaving Twitter and moving to Parler. Previously, conservatives and liberals were polarized in their different filter bubbles on common platforms. In the future, will we be even more polarized by being on totally different platforms?”

Thanks for writing, Adam. I haven’t been on Parler, but at some point I’ll check it out. If my blood pressure could stand it. My view is that while social media platforms almost certainly exacerbate polarization, a host of underlying conditions make it happen in the first place, so it’s not all Jack Dorsey’s fault. Things like talk radio and Fox News are already self-affirming spaces for conservatives. What makes broader platforms like Facebook or Twitter more interesting is that while people can definitely immerse themselves in bubbles there, opposing views are also available. Yes, some of those views, including ones that include disinformation, can be alarming. But on a wider platform, those are more likely to be called out and exposed and maybe even removed. Platforms catering to one side, like Parler, might normalize extremes. Also, I am skeptical of how successful Parler will become. Communicating to the limited audience of those who share your views seems boring compared to expressing those views in a place where everyone can potentially see them. How can you own liberals if they don’t know you exist?

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle

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