Whether it’s for new products or routine maintenance, Apple’s online store goes down from time to time. Today, for example, the store went down ahead of Apple’s WWDC keynote that’s set to begin within the hour. When the store comes back online, expect new products, like updated MacBook Pros, to show up in Apple’s inventory.
Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when the Apple online store goes down? Well, even Apple’s own engineers in Cupertino don’t know what new products are coming next.
According to former Apple online store engineer Joe Moreno, “Even the engineers don’t know what the new product will be. We have catalogers who put the stuff we don’t have access to into the database.” The store usually goes down a couple of hours before a keynote, like it did this morning, and it doesn’t came back online until Apple’s keynote is over. That gives Apple’s engineers time to “migrate the new products and code that are in the database into the production database.”
According to Moreno:
“Then it gets tested and still, at this point, it’s just the catalogers who can see it. The engineers don’t get called in unless there’s a problem. The store is already up before the keynote is over, but you can’t get to it – the caches are preloaded.”
Moreno remembers working on the online store during the first iPhone launch. “We saw the announcement in a conference room and then we all went back to our desks and kept refreshing the page waiting for the store to go back up,” said Moreno. “When it did, we were all like, “Wow, iPhone!” Sounds like the rest of the world’s reaction at the time.
Apple is arguably the most secretive company on earth, so none of this should really surprise you. Still, it says something about the nature of the company when even trusted employees have no clue what’s coming next.
Source: Business Insider
