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Comment by synnik | Hacker News Reader

Wait a sec - "it was always an interesting experience to turn the store back on after Steve Jobs walked off stage following one of his keynote presentations"

Does Apple seriously turn off their store while Jobs talks? Or is he talking about pushing new content out based on announcements?

The former just sounds... Odd.

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They turn the store off when they introduce new products, I suspect more as a tradition than anything.

You wouldn't want an uninformed person buying an iPhone 3GS after Steve has already introduced the iPhone 4, but you don't want to put it up for sale yet because the media should be paying attention to Steve, not the store. If they just launched the item with all the specs on the store as soon as it was introduced in the keynote or media event or whatever, then it would ruin the suspense. Jobs is a salesman.

Yep. During keynotes, the web store is usually "down for maintenance". For simple reasons - they don't want to pre-announce before "The Steve(tm)", but they want to have all the new products immediately available after the keynote.

Ok, but that sure sounds like a design flaw. I would have expected that they would still have an option to push the new products live at the time of their choosing vs. disabling online purchases of their existing products.

I would think an appropriate separation of content from the site itself would allow them to reach their same business goals without deliberately giving themselves an outage.

It's not so much a technical issue as it is a marketing decision. The store being down creates a sizable amount of suspense. Of course they could leave it up if they wanted to, but it's as much part of Apple folklore now as Steve's turtleneck.

Yup, we turn off the online Apple store during the Steve Jobs keynote. Next time he speaks, check out store.apple.com and you'll see the yellow "We'll be back soon" sticky. If my memory serves, it's been like that for at least ten years.

Apple generally turns off the store for keynotes related to new product launches (new iPhone, sometimes MacBook/etc refreshes).

I suspect he means both. Apple turns off their store (i.e. puts up the "We'll be right back" post it) and prevents orders when there is a major product announcement. They turn it back on (with new products) after the announcement is over. I bet there's one hell of a traffic spike after those keynotes.

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