“When the first Apple stores opened in 2001, people stood in round-the-block lines to be the first inside, and the first to experience Apple’s iconic design language given form and space—an iPod reproduced in bricks and mortar,” Jack Stewart reports for Wired. “Now, 15 years later, Apple’s trying to rekindle that enthusiasm in the heart of San Francisco, with a flagship store in Union Square. And it’s a big ‘un, with 42 foot high sliding glass doors fronting a revamped interior, full of design flourishes that are likely to filter outward to Apple monoliths everywhere.”
“The company is trying to give the impression that these are not just places to hand over money in exchange for pieces of beautifully designed pieces of glass and aluminum, but spaces to come and hang out,” Stewart reports. “‘It all starts with the storefront—taking transparency to a whole new level—where the building blends the inside and the outside,’ said Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, in a statement.”
“The new store is a combination of Ive’s design passion — so it has plenty of trademark glass and steel—and the work of architecture firm Foster and Partners, best known for defining major parts of London’s skyline with gem-like, faceted, curved buildings,” Stewart reports. “The same team has cooperated on stores in China, and Apple’s new HQ, a donut-shaped building nicknamed the ‘Spaceship.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The store is excellent branding.
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Maybe a great store with interesting and possibly even inviting areas, but too bad Apple does not have a number of new, world changing products to sell in that store.
Steve Jobs:
“I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The product starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”
As far as Steve was concerned, it is the beginning of the end when a company focuses more on HOW to sell a product than on making fantastic products to sell. I 100% agree with him on this.
Making a big splash with this store while things like the current Mac Pro (announced almost THREE years ago) to languish is a perfect example of this horrible attitude.
Unless this attitude changes at Apple, I don’t expect things to get better (and over the next couple of years may even get worse).
Absolutely.
My next computer will be a tower so I can get all the crap off my desk when I retire the silliest Mac ever made, the Mac Pro.
It will run Windows to support my trading apps.
I am struggling to find a reason why it should run Mac OS.
And, heaven knows, Apple doesn’t make ANY decent apps any more.
Shadowself, you seem to have forgotten that Steve Jobs obsessed over *everything* associated with Apple including the design and appearance of the Apple Stores. There is nothing wrong with upgrading and evolving the Apple Stores as long as Apple also addresses the rest of the picture.
The current Mac Pro is the Cube… a failure.
That’s not to say it’s a totally beautiful machine with design that really blows me away, but it’s aimed at the wrong market. Why did Apple discontinue the Braun style Mac Pro tower? It was everything a pro needed.
Too much negativity on this forum. Perhaps some of you ought to go out and start your own computer/electronics company and do things better? Or, perhaps, you ought to apply to work at Apple so that you can show them how to do it right?