Apple should come up with a way of electronically sucking up and squelching ambient noise. Better retail experience.
You can't electronically suck up noise.
You can provide noise cancellation devices, but the problem with those is one of wave length. Let's say that you have a noise in the 1 kHz range. That means that its wavelength is one foot. In order for the noise to be canceled, the speaker must be within a fraction of a wavelength of the sound. So if you have a 1kHz sound coming to your ears and use noise canceling headphones, it works - because the speaker is within inches of the sound coming to your ears.
For a large room, that won't work. People are moving around and are in different locations. Even if you were able to position the speaker so that it canceled the noise for one person, it wouldn't work for someone in a different location. And as soon as the first person moved, it wouldn't work, either. When you add in the range of frequencies, the problem becomes even worse.
Unless they could find some way to make noise cancellation to follow you around (and I can't see any way to do that short of handing out headphones when you walk in the store), it won't work in a large retail environment, so they need to focus on sound absorption.
Maybe ceilings designed with soundproofing in mind could help that without carpeting entering the equation…
That's not that hard to do. There are hundreds of things they could do to minimize sound levels. Changing the materials on the walls and ceilings. Changing the materials of the tables. Changing the store design to break up the space. Breaking up the large flat areas. And so on.
The problem is doing that without destroying the aesthetics. It will be interesting to see how they do that.
Comments
You can't electronically suck up noise.
You can provide noise cancellation devices, but the problem with those is one of wave length. Let's say that you have a noise in the 1 kHz range. That means that its wavelength is one foot. In order for the noise to be canceled, the speaker must be within a fraction of a wavelength of the sound. So if you have a 1kHz sound coming to your ears and use noise canceling headphones, it works - because the speaker is within inches of the sound coming to your ears.
For a large room, that won't work. People are moving around and are in different locations. Even if you were able to position the speaker so that it canceled the noise for one person, it wouldn't work for someone in a different location. And as soon as the first person moved, it wouldn't work, either. When you add in the range of frequencies, the problem becomes even worse.
Unless they could find some way to make noise cancellation to follow you around (and I can't see any way to do that short of handing out headphones when you walk in the store), it won't work in a large retail environment, so they need to focus on sound absorption.
That's not that hard to do. There are hundreds of things they could do to minimize sound levels. Changing the materials on the walls and ceilings. Changing the materials of the tables. Changing the store design to break up the space. Breaking up the large flat areas. And so on.
The problem is doing that without destroying the aesthetics. It will be interesting to see how they do that.