Regarding:
VIC 1 per 1,867,700
QLD 1 per 1,512,566
WA 1 per 1,205,300
NSW 1 per 909,100
ACT: 1 per 373,100
SA, NT, TAS none.
Go Victoria! Relevant enough to have some, strong enough to resist their ubiquity!
What you mean to say is,
"Huh, I thought Melbourne was hipster-land".
Which is, unfortunately, true, but real hipsters hate Apple because it's an American monolithic corporation that makes inferior products that are all about the label, which is the kind of thing that only North American, some Scandinavian, and Sydneysider hipsters like.
/gentletroll
And:
is there supposed to be a political correlation here?
Just an economic one. Apple Stores are generally only found in high-rent areas and in "nicer" malls. As I've told a friend, if you're walking past an iPad billboard in Los Angeles, you're in a real upscale neighborhood.
There is also a correlation with how much of the population lives in a big city. In a lot of the middle of the country there are a lot of people living in small to medium size towns which cannot support an Apple store. Whereas in the west, a lot of the population is congregated in cities. Nevada is the best example of this. Even though it's a fairly downscale state, it is also a very urban state with almost everyone living in the two cities. Even in California, you have cities like Modesto, Fresno and Bakersfield which are big enough to support an Apple store even though they aren't that well off.
I'd been going to make a joke about Queensland being more technologically advanced than Victoria (to contrast with the more common jokes of visiting Queensland and having to wind back your watch 50 years) but this is the actual reason. Queensland is the most de-centralised state, and Victoria is small, compact, and with only a few large regional centres outside Melbourne.
