Apple Grrl

From the folks at CNET:

In New York City, you can go to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in midtown 24 hours a day, seven days a week and browse the Web from the Macs on display. But due to a new Apple regulation, you can no longer access MySpace.com.

ThinkSecret first broke the rumor that Apple was blocking MySpace from it’s stores, and Apple’s representatives have now confirmed it, saying:

“Nearly 2 million people visit Apple stores every week,” the statement read. “We want to provide everyone a chance to test-drive a Mac, so we are no longer offering access to MySpace in our stores.” According to an Apple representative, the News Corp.-owned MySpace is the only site that has been blocked.

The reason for the ban? With Macs in Apple stores hooked up to broadband and available for users to test drive, MySpace users were coming in and hogging all of the machine time. This was keeping other potential Mac buyers from being able to hop on a Mac and see what it could do.

An employee from one of the Apple Stores had this to say:

“MySpace is a big issue for the Apple stores because people come in, Photobooth themselves (using Macs’ built-in webcams), then stick their picture up on their MySpace account and loiter at machines for hours,” the source said in an e-mail. “It is especially troublesome at the flagships and high-volume stores, and for a while there was no official word on how to deal with it.”

The impetus for the ban were flagship stores, like the one on Fifth Avenue in New York, that are open longer hours and have a high traffic volume (New York’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store is open 24 hours, 7 days a week). The upcoming release of the iPhone is expected to increase traffic even more, and Apple wants to be prepared.

[tags]Apple, Apple Store, Genius Bar, MySpace, Safari, iPhone, iMac, MacBook, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, New York’s Fifth Avenue[/tags]

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