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Apple Store Opens in Bull Ring, Birmingham, UK 29/04/05
We all loves Macs – so a swanky new company store opening is great news!
Apple advance their market presence with a brand new store in one of the UK’s most prestigious city retail developments – The Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham, UK which opened on Friday 29th April at 6.00pm (GMT). They also used the event to launch the long-awaited MacOS 10.4 – otherwise known as ‘Tiger’.
I went along after receiving an email from Apple a couple of weeks previous. Due to the hype that usually surrounds such events, I thought Iíd get there a bit early – thank god I did!! There was hundreds of people waiting patiently in-line much to the amusement of the general public!We waited with the promise of a free t-shirt, and a ’scratchcard’ that could bag us a range of amazing prizes. There was also rumours of the famous Apple ‘Goodie Bags’ that have been known to retail for about £250 but contain a random selection of Apple goods worth somewhere in the region of £800-£1000!
Well – I got into the store after about an hour and a half wait and I was not exactly amazed by the interior design – it was crammed full of people, so not ideal to take in the finer aesthetics! There was a very cute area with kids seats and iMacs at their level, nice for parents to leave their kids on whilst browsing the hardware! There was a hell of a lot of iBooks with Tiger installed to play around on, which look pretty cool, but hardly ground-breaking. As we have been promised, when all these third party developers start making their own widgets I think it could really be something amazing. I overheard a sales assistant explaining this to a member of the public stating the range of amazing widgets already available, including ‘a countdown to the next episode of ..(insert geeky sci-fi series here) on TV’ I wonder just what things people are going to come up with for these widgets!! Don’t get me wrong, I think this is kinda cool, but surely he could have come up with a better example than that! This would have been appropriate for someone that looked like they where interested in sci-fi, but this guy looked more like a city banker to me – suited and booted!
Prices in the store seemed reasonable and they had an extensive range of peripherals from the likes of Lacie . It seems they have chosen their third party products very carefully, and all seemed to be of the best quality. Overall I found the experience fairly disappointing – there was no special opening offers and no goodie bags to be seen for sale;( The scratchcards seemed to basically amount to a 10% off offer (which you couldn’t use on software – eg Tiger!) or a free single tune download from the iTunes music store whoohoo, I’ll just add that to my existing 5000+ song collection on my iPod, or maybe not bother!
I’m happy to see Apple open a company store in my home city, I work on Macs every day and want to see the company progress and innovate. I do have to say though that I feel sorry for the other two city outlets – there is an independent Mac specialist which is sure to not last long and a Mac area in Selfridges department store, which probably will stay around for a while. I wonder just how many Mac users there are in one city and how many outlets are required to support them, because Apple are sure to carry that store for the far foreseeable future whether it makes a profit or not and considering the amount of customers lined up at the tills in the first 20 minutes I’d be surprised if it’s much burden to carry for such a prestigious brand placement.
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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 5 March, 2009 (18:54) | First published: 30 April, 2005
Filed under Design opinions and rumors No Comments »
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