You can beat them on customer experience but I have yet to see a company successfully scale it in the tech space (aside from possibly Apple). Everyone hates the incumbent, loves the personalized support, lack of ads, and breadth of features of the challenger, then enshitification happens as the challenger starts scaling.
I assume you didn't mean their brick and mortar stores, because some of the customer service I've experienced there has been atrocious. Why should I have to make an appointment just to buy one of their overpriced laptops? That's not how stores work.
Apple’s stores are too successful - they are beyond capacity.
In my area, the Apple Store represents about 40% of the mall’s gross sales. Although part of that is more a function of the decline of malls, the store is expanding for the 3rd time.
While I agree the stores are annoying (they seem like annoying jewelry shops filled with poser know-nothing cool kids) but they do have web accessible local inventory. Why do you make an appointment for that? I just buy anything I need online and pick up at the store when the order is ready. It's not like they customize anything. It's basically a glorified shoe store. They either have what you want on the shelf or they don't.
I've never had to make an appointment to walk in and buy something, although they do sometimes ask for a pickup window if you order ahead online. Even in the height of the pandemic I don't think they limited shopping to appointment only.
