“While many of us will be celebrating Valentine’s Day this Saturday, for Apple it represents the end of an era,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac. “At 10pm today, Apple will close its existing Oakridge retail store in San Jose, California — with a new, larger one set to open Saturday morning at 10am. In the process, Apple will have marked the end of its mini-store experiment, with the Oakridge venue being the last of its kind.”
“First launched in 2004, Apple’s mini-stores were an effort to quickly roll out new Apple Stores to keep up with demand at a time when the company was unable to find enough of the larger sites it was looking for,” Dormehl reports. “Nine mini-stores were opened in all — ranging in size from 2,000-square-feet down to a tiny 500-square foot.”
Dormehl reports, “The mini-stores were a great success, and Apple briefly considered trying to make them a fixture at airports. However, they quickly became unwieldy as Apple transitioned into the giant that it is today — resulting in too many customers for the diminutive size of each venue.”
Read more and see the photos in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And say hello to dedicated Apple Watch Stores.
Related article:
The Apple Watch could push techies out of Apple Retail Stores – How about ‘Apple Watch Stores?’ – February 3, 2015
Don’t close down the remaining stores …. Rather follow MDN advise and make them Warch” and accessory stores ….
Airports too!
I’m pretty sure there’s still a mini Apple store in the Providence Place Mall. Though, I haven’t been there in the last 4 or 5 months.
We’ve sure come a long way from the days when the nearest place to buy Apple products was the CompUSA, where the Apple stuff was shoved into the corner the farthest from the door, as if they were ashamed of it.
——RM
A lot of the normal stores are bursting also. From Jacksonville to Orlando, Tampa and Miami … you can barely get in the stores due to the enormous crowds. I don’t know how the watch is going to work out in a place that often needs security just to limit the number of people in the store at one time. Today, I either order stuff online, hit a Best Buy or last resort go into the Apple store. This is good problem to have, but it is a problem. I know that they have expanded a couple places that really need it, and I think the trend could continue. Apple could justify being anchor stores at many of the Malls and Strips they are in today.
Maybe Microsoft could use them as their stores need desperate down-sizing on their inevitable way to non-existence.