World of Apple

We’ve now posted the photos from the Grand Opening of the Brent Cross Apple Store.

Take a look

Apple has confirmed that it will open its 5th retail in the UK on Saturday, the Grand Opening is scheduled for 9:00am on Saturday 28th January 2006.

World of Apple should be providing some coverage.

London’s second Apple retail store will open at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre on Saturday January 28th at 9.00 am — and you’re invited to help us celebrate. Throughout Grand Opening Month, we’ll host a variety of in-store presentations, demonstrations and workshops — all free of charge.

Apple EasyPay system is reportedly becoming a major part in the Apple Retail Store experience. Over the holiday season the system was used to help process the mass orders for iPods. The area was nicknamed iPod Express and only last week was criticised by ifoAppleStore.

So it appears that the wireless and paperless ordering system will continue and should hopefully improve the service in some of the bigger stores.

A power outage cut the power to Apple’s inventory and management computer systems thus cutting links to credit card processing networks.

The power cut forced retail stores to manually process credit card purchases for over 30 minutes, lines at some stores began to snake out doors discouraging new customers from entering the stores.

Many retail analysts believe that Friday 22nd would have been one of the best pre-Christmas selling days.

It has been reported by the New York Times that Apple will be opening a third New York store just across from the Empire State building on 21 W. 34th Street.

The space is reported to be a 30,000ft five story building.

Remember Nik from the Trafford Store opening? No I didn’t think so, well this time he’s at the front of the line and has snapped some pictures of already.

The Store opened an hour ago so expect some more pictures to arrive within the next couple of hours.

Check out Niks Site.
Some additional pictures here.

Apple has begun testing of a new section to its Retail Stores, the iPod Bar is very much like the Genius bar but focuses solely on helping customers with iPod problems.

As another Mac site has kindly pointed out, this seems like a fair waste of time as most of the “broken” iPod’s just need a restart, if people only read the instruction manual.

Apple has begun recruiting for its first mainland Europe Retail Store, an advertisement has appeared on the Italian retail website recruiting for the usual positions.

The page also reveals that Apple will open the store in 2006. The location is still under wraps.

As with previous years Apple is planning to offer discounts on selected products on the 25th of November.

In previous years Apple has varied which products it has applied discounts too and varied the amount of discount.

Unfortunately World of Apple were unable to attend the Grand Opening of the Trafford Centre Apple Store but some other lucky sod got to go.

Earlier this week ifoAppleStore reported that Apple had opened the Store before the Grand Opening day, for us this just spoilt the magic, bit like Santa turning up on the 23rd of December.

More images have appeared on the net and a detailed account of the days events.
View the Gallery
Read the diary entry
View another Gallery