Like I'm sure that's what the point was. Someone would go try some Macs out at the Apple store and walk past the Microsoft store on the way to their car. They'd go in, check out the goods (as a matter of comparison shopping), and possibly buy a PC instead.

In my experience though, post-iPhone, very few people go to Apple stores to buy computers. Sure, that's still probably a lot of people, but 99.99% of the people in the store seem to be there about an iPhone (half the time, an iphone that they broke and expect to be fixed under warranty lol).

MS was in the business of selling phones for a while. I wonder if their stores lost traffic because they don't do phones anymore.

This proved a correct thesis for the apple store, and then the stores grew as apple built mass market products.

Microsoft’s product lineup does fairly well. But it is not mass market. And while they are different from PCs, they still run Windows, which is widely familiar among laptop buyers. Further, retail is less important a channel than it used to be. Microsoft can market its products directly online. So even if Microsoft has some of the disAdvantages Apple had, it doesn’t really have the full use case.

EDIT: Yes, everyone, I understand the marketing and lifetime-value reasons for doing that. I'm just questioning the value of comparing crowd sizes as a direct measure of relative instantaneous revenue/success.

It doesn't really matter, though, because as the OP pointed out, Apple Stores are massively profitable. This is well known in retail circles.

Landlords fall all over themselves to get Apple Stores. Real estate developers will include Apple Stores, or Apple Store lookalikes in their renderings even before the buildings are built, just to get people interested in their projects.

Microsoft set up a lot of stores in the same malls as Apple Stores. This disparity in numbers has always been the case, no matter how good the MS experience has been as others have pointed out. Seems Apple learned their lessons from the first time the battled Microsoft. Consumers don't do as deep of a research as the tech crowd thinks.

Crowds may be anecdotal, but the crowds clearly do translate into revenue for Apple.

The link spells out revenue per square foot for Apple as $5546, vs an average of $325. Second and third places bring in $3721 and $2951 per square foot.

[0] https://chainstoreage.com/news/most-profitable-retailers-sal...

I think that every one of them becomes a customer, eventually. Many of them become evangelists, which can sometimes be even more valuable.

There were--cough--a number of teenagers hanging around like groupies. One of them--cough--may even have installed their heavily customized SuperStarTrek game, and had it become the store's favourite demo.