Apple staffers go nuts on 3 continents
Hollering and high fives at store openings in Queensland, Montpellier and New York City
Running the gauntlet in Queensland, Australia. Image: Nodeblue
Someday Apple (AAPL) will open a store and no one will notice.
But we're not quite there yet.
The company held grand openings for new retail outlets on three continents Saturday — in Chermside, Australia; Montpellier, France; and New York City — and each was accompanied by huge crowds and predictably over-the-top staffers.
As the videos below the fold demonstrate, these events follow what is by now a well-rehearsed script. The customers queue up — true believers camping out overnight. When the lines reach critical mass (in the case of New York's Upper West Side store, stretching around several city blocks), someone gives a signal and the employees go nuts, running wild through the crowd, whooping and hollering and giving high fives. Then the final seconds are counted down, and the faithful enter sacred ground, greeted by a gauntlet of blue, black, orange, teal or fire-engine red.
All this for a free t-shirt.
Below: The videos.
Inside Apple's new New York City store
A sneak peek at Manhattan's fourth Apple Store, set to open Saturday Nov. 14
Photo: Philip Elmer-DeWitt
The Upper West Side, that bastion of liberal thinking and discretionary spending nestled between Central Park and the Hudson River on the island of Manhattan, is finally getting its own Apple Store.
The retail outlet — Apple's 279th and the city's fourth — is scheduled to open Saturday morning. On Thursday, the press got an early tour of the facility.
It's a striking edifice, all glass and grey marble. The exterior is dominated by a two-story glass facade, a big white apple logo and a curved glass roof — a first for an Apple Store.
The ground floor interior is classic Apple (AAPL) retail, with 16 stand-alone blond wood tables on roughly 8,500 square feet of retail space — the largest single-floor display of Apple products in the world, according to the company.
More photos and an update below the fold: More
Apple invades France
The opening of a retail store near the Louvre draws huge crowds in Paris
Photo: Fabio M. Zambelli, setteB.IT
Who says Parisians are blasé? Tout Paris, it seems, turned out Saturday morning for the opening of Apple's (AAPL) first retail outlet in France. The video posted below the fold shows lines of shoppers that stretched for blocks.
Planning for the store, located in the Carrousel du Louvre, an upscale shopping mall beneath the Tuileries garden and adjacent to the museum, began more than two years ago. A second store in Montpelier was actually ready before this one, but its opening was postponed, according to ifoAppleStore, in deference to the City of Lights.
There are several videos of the event, including a four-minute version suggested by reader Rick in San Jose, Calif. But we've selected piratec.net's because it's been edited down to less than two minutes:
Apple is coming to Broadway
The Big Apple's newest Mac store is opening on the Upper West Side next Saturday
Source: Apple Inc.
Media invitations went out Friday for a press preview of the new Apple Store in Manhattan — the city's fourth — scheduled to be unveiled Saturday, Nov. 14.
The store, located on a nearly triangular site at Broadway and 67th Street, is well-positioned to get attention from the crowds and TV cameras heading for Central Park West to catch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade less than two weeks later.
New York City has been good to Apple (AAPL). The glass cube of its flagship store is believed to be the highest-grossing retail outlet on Fifth Avenue, bringing in an estimated $35,000 per square foot, nearly double the gross of Tiffany's sales floor and triple Harry Winston's, according to a New York real estate expert interviewed by Bloomberg reporters last summer.
Below the fold: Photographs showing the plastic faux curtain that's covering the building site and the curve of the store's unusual glass roof, courtesy of ifoAppleStore.com.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
Apple store back up. New Macs today.
The rumors of a flurry of new machines were true
Photo: Apple Inc.
UPDATE: Apple's online store came back online shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern with new iMacs, a new MacBook, a new Mac mini and a new "Magic" Mouse (the Mighty Mouse having run into trademark problems). The products are displayed on the reconfigured website and described in a series of press releases:
Apple's website describes a new "mightier" mini, but no press release on that yet.
- – - -
Apple's (AAPL) online store went off line Tuesday morning, adding fuel to rumors that it held its quarterly earnings call a day early to clear the decks for the release of some new hardware.
The Apple blogs have been predicting this for weeks, none more succinctly than Daring Fireball's John Gruber, who responded to a provocation from Dan "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons with this cryptic note:
Unseemly for the Fake Steve character to be so wrong (or, frankly, even to care) about what I know.
By Thursday, I'm sure everybody will be talking about Windows 7 again.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
Smash n' Grab: 23 MacBooks, 14 iPhones, 9 iPod touches, 31 seconds
WPVI-TV
One of the hottest videos on the Web today is the surveillance tape of a burglary in progress at the Sagemore Apple Store in Marlton, N.J, 12 miles from Camden.
It shows five perps in masks smashing the plate-glass doors, signaling to the security guard that they had a gun, and clearing off the display tables with the efficiency of a Indy 500 pit crew.
The take: 23 MacBook Pros, 14 iPhones and 9 iPod touches in 31 seconds flat. Estimated value, based on average selling price: $46,345.
The burglars hit the store at 2:05 a.m. Wednesday morning. Anybody with information that could lead to their arrest is asked to call police at 856-983-1118 or the confidential tip line at 856-988-4699.
According to ifoAppleStore, it was the second burglary in four months at Apple's (AAPL) Sagemore store. This one could use a metal security gate. And some locks on the merchandise.
Below the fold: the video, courtesy of WPVI-TV, the local Philadelphia ABC affiliate. Also, a link to video of last week's 2 p.m. MST hit on an Apple Store in Chandler, Ariz., in which a half-dozen iPhones disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Thanks to TUAW's Michael Rose for spotting this.
Video: An Apple Store trifecta
"Yes, I am a nerd!" -- JaxBearsFan
Despite the recession, Apple (AAPL) opened three new retail outlets on Saturday — in Mississauga, Ont., Naperville, Ill., and Reston, Va. — and its fan base obliged by forming long snaking queues and posting hand-held videos documenting the madness that ensued.
These YouTube videos — complete with T-shirted Apple employees happily making fools of themselves — have become icons of the company's extraordinary appeal. What other brand, in or out of the computer industry, can command such loyalty or draw such crowds?
The event in Mississauga, outside Toronto, generated the most video — much of it apparently created by prepubescent girls on in-store Macs.
Our favorite moment: when the high-fiving Naperville videographer who calls himself JaxBearsFan turns the camera on himself and declares: "Yes, I am a nerd!"
Below the fold: Three sample videos.
Lines form for the new iPhone in New York and Tokyo
Here are two postcards from the front lines of the smartphone wars.
The first, at right, shows three college students from Monclair, N.J. — Matt Dodd, 18, Sam Epstein,18, and Keith Hobin, 19 — huddled under borrowed umbrellas in front of Apple's (AAPL) flagship New York Fifth Avenue store to buy the latest in multitouch cellular technology.
They arrived at 7 a.m. EDT, 24 hours before Apple is scheduled to begin selling the new iPhone 3GS to the public. The heavy rain hadn't let up since they arrived and the forecast was calling for more rain into the night.
The second, below, appeared on the Japanese website +D Mobile (English translation). It shows the roughly 200 customers who queued up Thursday morning near the Softbank flagship store in Tokyo's Omotesando shopping district to reserve their new iPhones, which won't arrive in Japan until June 26.
According a second report, smaller lines had also formed at Softbank outlets throughout the city and at many of the electronics stores that line Tokyo's Akihabara Electric Town.
The guys from New Jersey, who were among the first 15 people in line at the Fifth Avenue cube last July when the iPhone 3G went on sale, say they're here for the new iPhone, yes, but mostly for the "fun."
"It's an experience," says Keith Hoban, a freshman at Drexel University. "This doesn't happen too often. It's nice to just hang out at the Apple store, see what happens and be among the first to get it."
Apple was 5th busiest retail site on Cyber Monday
Apple.com was the exception in comScore's report on retail sales for Cyber Monday 2008, the biggest online shopping day in a year marked by global financial meltdown.
While its competitors were offering deep discounts to pull in recession-battered customers, Apple (AAPL) had already ended its Black Friday sale and by Monday was back to charging its usual premium prices for laptops, desktops and MP3 players.
Yet its online store still managed to grab the No. 5 spot in comScore's ranking of the top 20 most visited retail sites on Monday Dec. 1, handily beating not only Dell (DELL) and Hewlett Packard (HPQ), but such full-fledged retail outlets as Best Buy (BBY), Toys "R" Us and Circuit City (CC).
Apple.com drew nearly 3.7 million visitors that day, up 43% from November's somewhat depressed average. The big winner for Cyber Monday was eBay (EBAY), with nearly 13 million visitors, followed by Amazon (AMZN; 9.2 million), Wal-Mart (WMT; 6.7 million) and Target (TGT; 4.8 million).
Overall, according to comScore, online spending was up 15% from 2007, driven by a 22% increase in the number of buyers. But those buyers made 9% fewer purchases than last year, and they spent 5% less.
Below the fold: comScore's top 20 chart, its breakdown of e-commerce spending and, perhaps most usefully for tight-fisted shoppers, its ranking of the top 10 comparison shopping sites, in which Shopzilla.com was the big winner. More
