Best Computer Store

• Apple Store SoHo

  103 Prince Street, 212-226-3126

  Walking into the Apple Store Soho is like suddenly entering liberated territory—minus the looting. The vast, airy retail spot makes it possible to imagine that after years of our suffering under Bill Gates’s totalitarian rule, the Apple flag flies proudly over the land. Mobs of giddy Mac partisans and Wintel refugees roam the two-story space—a show-stopping glass staircase and a translucent walkway glimmer in the sunshine that floods in from skylights—and all share the same epiphany when they gaze upon the serenely showcased iMacs, digital-editing stations, and titanium laptops: I need to buy an Apple. Now. But there’s no hard sell here: The cheery staff seems freshly flown in from some Zen-ish Apple commune in Cupertino. You’re welcome to test-drive everything in sight, play stump-the-tech-experts at the Genius Bar upstairs, or sit in on the free instructional seminars, held several times daily. Everything else you might need (iPods, digital cameras, software) is here, too, of course.

From the 2003 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine