“Apple’s new store in Dubai is one of the first of a complete retail overhaul — one that will make Apple the new Starbucks, Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, told ‘CBS This Morning’ on Tuesday,” Anita Balakrishnan reports for CNBC. “The new store format will have spaces for classes and meetings, new screens and hardware and ‘Genius groves,’ a tree-lined area where the ‘Genuis Bar’ once was. In addition to traditional IT services, creative professionals like photographers will also be on-site, Ahrendts said.”
“The new educational programming at the stores will be called ‘Today at Apple,’ and is designed to put Apple Stores on the map as a meeting place for the next generation, akin to the coffee shops that have become de facto offices for many of today’s creative professionals, Ahrendts said,” Balakrishnan reports. “‘I think we’ve always been this energy hub, if you will,’ Ahrendts said. ‘We are just empowering teams to take it further.'”
“Ahrendts, who joined Apple in 2014 after serving as CEO of Burberry, said that while she told Cook she’s ‘not a techie,’ she thinks that she was chosen for the post thanks to her leadership skills,” Balakrishnan reports. “‘My dad used to say, ‘I can teach you anything, but I can’t teach you to feel and to care,” Ahrendts said. ‘There’s 7 billion people, it’s not about you … When they open up and you’re both open, you can dream and come up with incredible things together.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ooh, lattes for everyone at the Barista Grove! (Shoulda kept the “Bar,” you navel-gazing over-thinkers you.)
Seriously, Apple Stores are not going to compete with coffee shops in the race to create “de facto offices for many of today’s creative professionals” without coffee, food, and comfortable seating.
You really want to take it to another level? Two words: Liquor license.
Retail is DEAD. Guess Apple hasn’t gotten the word.
Not Starbucks….
No, MDN Take®, good coffee, comfortable places to sit, sip ye coffee, read on your iDevice©.
then go to Starbucks…Apple is about selling consumer electronics, not cappuccinos.
man, Scott Forstall, where ever he is, must be glad he’s out of this Pipeline Timmy Circle Jerk that used to be Apple, Inc.
You mean “Can’t say I screwed up” Scott?
the maps was just an excuse to get rid of Scott as both Tim Cook and Ive couldn’t get along with him.
where I live in Canada on the same coast as California (i.e not that far from Cupertino) Apple Maps is STILL after years unusable . Roads are unlabelled or simply missing vs Google Maps. Getting rid of Scott and years later and still they have so much problems with the maps.
I know! Open a Starbucks corner in every Apple Store.
just kidding…
Once you start offering food, you need to offer a toilet… food & bev likely won’t happen, but it’ll be interesting to see what DOES change.
All Apple stores have restrooms. What I didn’t know is that customers may use them by asking, at least in the location I frequent.
Apple has had customer use bathrooms since the beginning. They took the signs down because people would rather use Apple’s than go to the mall bathrooms… go figure! 🙂
Parking for my one and only Apple store is a PITA!
Parking for most Starbucks I go to is easy and by their door.
This is why we don’t have a MacPro and this is why pros are leaving Apple.
Chase the Starbucks crowd if you want Apple, but you’ll only further devalue the Apple brand and be seen as a maker of expensive trinkets for airheads, instead of a place to do Real Work.
Came here to say this. This is yet another clear sign for those whose Apple pride centers around desktops and laptops. If there are ANY Pro’s still waiting for some “A copy of that high-end windows hardware, just running macOS” love, do what plenty of others have done and…. just move to some other platform. There are a few of you left out there, but the far greater masses using iOS means that you’re not likely to get the attention you once commanded from Apple ever again.
Think about it… you’ll be using the latest hardware with he latest drivers and if you want the next greatest thing, just buy it and pop it in! Whatever Apple comes up with as a Pro device are going to make MILLIONS of people happy and rake in MILLIONS of dollars, but it won’t be what YOU want. There are a few of you still hoping that macOS desktops and laptops are coming back… but they’re not. They will be updated primarily to the level that developers need to make software for…… iOS.
You got it! The mindset is all backwards. These guys think value is just a matter of image. They are acting like high school posturing cheerleaders instead of getting real work done and letting Apple’s reputation take care of itself. Doesn’t bode well for an upcoming Mac Pro, IMO.
Cocktails? I’m there!
Feeling and caring and empowering and dreaming and blah-frickety-blah, blah, blah. It sure didn’t take long for Californitis to infect Ahrendts, too.
Hey! Where’s my Mac Pro, you far-out Cali nutjobs?
Ahrendts is a far-out Indiana nutjob.
Overpaid and unable to to come up with a unique vision for Apple stores too. Chasing Starbucks in any way would be an embarrassment and further weakening of the Apple brand.
It’s in California, and your not welcome there.
i think ms. attends is a direct descendant of ralph kramden.
this is a seriously bad concept.
she needs her own version of alice k. to straighten her out, because tim is certainly not up to the job.
In lieu of, you know, actual new products this is a way to bring some positive buzz back to the Apple Stores. Most of the people in there now are grumps waiting for a Genius appointment because either something broke or they can’t figure out how to use the product.
And You’re not a grump, elitist snob?
No damn liquor. Actually, not interested in going to Apple Store to eat or drink, period.
She needs to go. She was a bad fit from day one . She has no real ideas . This will be an utter waste of money. Concentrate on products or you won’t need the stores
“Arendts is far far worse than the guy from Dixon.”
“Tim is a bozo as big as that guy from Cocoa Cola.”
I said this a long time ago.
MDN and many readers of MDN have slowly come around to accepting that Tim is a bozo, you all will come around to accepting that Arendt is an even bigger bozo. Once you infect the company with a bozo, the bozos increase and eventually run the company into the ground.
We are seeing the first signs of this.
Oh, sweet Jesus, Apple has lost its soul and identity. Apple determined to sell pretension and pomposity at inflated prices. The inmates are now in charge of the asylum.
Dreadful..another gem of a choice by Pipeline Tim
Angela talks too much; She should never have said that she wants to emulate Starbucks which means that she is skating where the puck was. Steve would have grilled her about it and would demand original thinking rather than elabortion. However, she’s an improvement over Browet.
100% agree that she is skating to where the puck was. You should take her job just with that one insight that she has not been able to see.
However, better than the Dixons guy? No. Browett was demonized for no reason. Even before he took the helm he was demonized for just being “from Dixons”.
Name me one thing that Browett should have been removed for……..no internet searches…..just off the top of your head. I can name you several things Arendts has done that should have seen her kicked out of apple. When she said, “I had no idea Apples customers were so passionate”, or words to that affect, that was the BIG hint.
He should have been removed because TIM hired him?
OK, no search. Rather than improving how to attract more customers to the Apple store, he went on austerity kick for no good reason by either firing or freezing hiring. That was the absolutely wrong, misguided focus as if he worked for a failing corporation like Dell or Fiorina’s HP at the time.
Steve would never have hired her.
Ok… I can see this working quite nicely actually… I don’t think you should be so quick to knock the starbucks idea… What I see is an increasing trend towards retail vacancies in malls… making it potentially less expensive per sq foot. (Just take over one of the GameStop stores when they shut down, a mall near me actually had 2 at one point at either end)
Next Apple wants to conduct classes, and have a “Genius Grove”.. They might be able to rent/renovate one of the empty storefronts and turn it into a better classroom environment at a decent price per sq ft, and cover costs by selling coffee etc the rest of the time…..They could close/reserve it when there are planned sessions.. (put counter at front so they could still sell to coffee passers-by….). in fact I’ve been to a Dunkin Donuts once that had a conference room for the community where local business can reserve for their own meetings… (School PTA interest groups, social clubs, etc..). They could be a magnet for that too… help conduct local business on a mac platform… I like the idea a lot actually as I think about it.
Well why not? Starbucks, and other retailers like Barnes & Noble have tried to become public hangouts, like internet cafes still do in villages, by shaping their stores as havens with creature comforts. Apple could pull it off by designs that have cosier spaces, the opposite of the grandiose milling emporiums I’ve seen.
I’d enjoy putting my feet up, surfing the web on one of their new laptops with a latté in the other hand and an aspen swishing gently over my head. Elsewhere in my sheltered cove would be a novelist working on her third draft, a girl teaching her young sister photo editing and a handsome beach bum learning about the waterproof watch from a happy blue shirted Apple associate. In a meeting space across a thatch of palms the local computer club would blissfully murmur.
If this dreamy redesign of Apple stores into social spaces pans out, I hope Microsoft copies the idea. That would be great! — because then, their store would be a place I’d be able to get serious work done.. it would be quieter than a library.
“Apple is overhauling its stores, and wants them to be the new Starbucks..”
Relax, it’s not meant literally.
It’s in line with the core mission of Apple, to support the natural direction the world is headed.