“The second coming has arrived. Don’t believe us? Take a trip to London’s Oxford Circus, look for Hanover Chapel’s Victorian facade and pass between its ionic pillars. Inside you will find a mumbling congregation and a host of welcoming and black-garbed service assistants, offering advice on mysteries beyond the layman’s understanding. And all show deference to a simple icon. An apple,” Mike Verdin writes for The Times Online.
“More than a century after the chapel was closed to Christian ritual, it has become a centre of technology-age homage – that paid to Apple Computers. Saturday’s opening of the site, Apple’s first retail store in Europe, attracted a queue of 5,000. Even the language surrounding the opening is religious in tone. Shoppers talk of their ‘worship’ of the brand, while an Apple spokeswoman tells Times Online of an ‘evangelical’ fascination for its products. On Wall Street, analysts propose a ‘halo effect’ – that the success of Apple’s iPod music player is promoting attention in the company’s other products,” Verdin writes. “Such hopes inspired an 11 per cent rise in Apple stock yesterday.”
Full article here.