There’s a Beep for that!
Borough President Markowitz has been pushing for an Apple store in the borough for years, and now he’s hoping to solidify his allegiance to the company — by gloating to Steve Jobs on his brand new iPad.
Yes, Marty Markowitz has an iPad and you don’t.
“It’s time to bring the goods to the real market,” Markowitz wrote in an e-mail to Jobs (on the newfangled, book-sized, touch-screen device, of course) on Thursday. “Let’s make ‘Apple Brooklyn’ the ultimate prototype store — one that changes the game yet again.”
The Beep also took up acting in an attempt to woo Apple retailers. In a two-minute mock video, Markowitz yells at an employee when he realizes where she picked up his sleek, $500 contraption.
“Manhattan? Why would you choose Manhattan?” Markowitz says before gleefully tapping out a message to Jobs. “Brooklyn doesn’t have an Apple store, with 2.6 million people?”
Markowitz is onto something in saying that an Apple store in the borough — with its hipsters, musicians and iPhones galore — would be a game-changer. But he only scratched the surface of the store’s value in his e-mail to Jobs.
After all, at least 30 percent of the visitors to Brooklyn’s most-important award-winning news site — um, the one you’re reading right now — are Mac users, a rate of Apple picking that is triple the national average.
Mac-master Jobs hasn’t responded to the Beep’s e-mail yet, but Apple retailers have been looking at the borough for a long time. Still, winning the computer mogul’s robot heart may take some time — Markowitz doesn’t quite know how to use the darn thing yet.
“I’m definitely looking cool when I’m using it,” Markowitz told The Brooklyn Paper. “But, being a Blackberry owner, I’m not accustomed to moving my fingers around on a touch screen to get it to work.”
Apple officials said Jobs doesn’t fully digest all his e-mails for 10 business days — but he is known to answer them personally. With four stores in Manhattan and another on Staten Island, Markowitz said it’s about time for Brooklyn’s own.
“It should be a multifunctional, drop dead, in-your-face Apple store — better than Manhattan’s,” Markowitz said.
