Designing for the user, and not for Apple's beautiful design aesthetic, could have prevented the problem. The overuse of graphics was a problem not only with the Apple Store. With the exception of America Online, every site we evaluated used too many graphics. To serve the customer, it's important to minimize the use of graphics on a website. A page with no graphics will appear on a customer's screen much faster than a page with many graphics.
Separate graphics require the customer's computer to visit the website's server once per graphic.
This slows down graphics loading even more. Text is often easier to read than graphics with loud colors or distracting animations. This is one consistent property of Web interfaces that most users are comfortable with. Users understand that clicking on underlined text will take them to another page. Some percentage of users, because of blindness or browser choice, see no graphics when they use the Web.