Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"New 27-inch iMac purchases direct from Apple now have a shipping wait time of 5 to 7 days, suggesting the hardware maker has addressed issues that plagued the desktops."

From months to days, we can only hope they have fixed the problems.

"Apple Stores continue to be sizable targets for theft, it seems -- the local paper in Lancaster, PA reports that four young men stole 17 iPhones from the displays at an Apple Store recently, resulting in almost $10,000 worth of losses. The robbery took place during the day; at around 1:30pm, the young men just started grabbing, and walked out of the store with as many iPhones as they could carry."

Big loss like this and I'm sure they will do some followup, and not just write it off. The iPhones didn't have SIM cards and are supposedly entered in a crime database so be careful if you are in PA and someone offers to sell you an iPhone cheap!

"It was freezing this morning as the Manhasset Long Island, NY Apple store opened for business. Employees wearing T-Shirts (they weren't allowed to wear coats), ran up and down the waiting line of hundreds of people both pumping up the crowd and trying to stay warm."

The store opened up this past weekend giving Apple customers another choice of shopping options. 

"The seaside town of Cardiff (UK) will host the grand opening of the St David's 2 Apple store this Thursday at 10 a.m., part of a huge expansion of the adjacent St David's Centre that opens at the same time. The new store will expand Apple store coverage to the capital of Wales, a major tourist and shopping destination."

And with this opening on the 22nd of October, Apple adds store number 23 to their UK locations.

You all know what this means...stay tuned!

"After months of rumors, Apple's official online store for Brazil has officially opened. It joins the 34 other countries with localized online stores. The Brazilian store is a mirror of many others and joins Apple's effort to establish a presence south of the United States. Presently, there are localized online stores in Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador among others."

If you are traveling to Brazil, you can access the store at apple.com/br. Unfortunately there are no brick and mortar Apple stores, yet anyway.

"Apple is planning to open its Promenade Temecula store in Temecula on Saturday, September 26 at 10:00AM."

The store is located in the Promenade Temecula outdoor expansion, on Promenade Way. The store will offer the usual amenities but will also be offering some free seminars for it's grand opening week.

"It's been a busy day for the Nā Lei Hulu, Ka Wēkiu Dancers, who started their Hit and Run Hula at Pier 39 this morning, bused over to the Ferry Building, made their way to the stage at Union Square, stopped at the Apple Store, the Cable Car Turnaround, were kicked out of the Westfield Mall food court by security (figures), and quickly ambushed the BART station instead," Leanne Maxwell reported for SFist.

"Next on Apple's retail domination tour: Naperville, IL. Reader Mike Heller wrote to tell us it'll be "on Jefferson Ave. just across from Lou Malnati's Pizza."

Congrats to Naperville for the bit of paradise known as the Apple Store they are getting. According to the OpenLine blog, this will make a total of 6 Apple Stores in the Chicago area, but no word yet on opening date. The store isn't listed on the Apple site either. Well, at least as of today it wasn't listed.

"Apple offered clarification Wednesday for when exactly the new iPhone 3G S will go on sale."

Looks like next Friday, June 19th at 8am the new iPhone will be available at Apple Stores in the US and 7 other countries, and yes this is in all time zones at 8am. This will be the same at the AT&T stores, unless you have pre-ordered in which case you will be able to pick them up at 7am. I'm wondering if this will generate the lines that the last two sales have generated, what do you think?

"Apple's clearly onto something with its 24-hour store plopped down in a tourist hot spot. The New York Post reports that as of sometime last year, Apple was pulling down $440 million a year in sales at its Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City. The numbers surfaced in the paper's investigation of empty retail space along Fifth Avenue."

When you are one of the most photographed landmarks in the world, it's no surprise that you will generate the foot traffic and the dollars they bring to the location. But $440 million USD in sales is still an impressive number, even in good economic times. In comparison, according to the New York Post article, the SoHo store brings in about $100 million USD per year and they expect the new Santa Barbara store to bring in about $20 million USD. Quite a difference in revenue. The total sales figures for the 252 stores in the Apple chain this past quarter were roughly $1.87 Billion USD, a few reasons why they aren't putting a halt on the building of new stores I suppose.

"Despite a challenging economic climate, Apple is not shying away from putting more money into the consumer market. In its quarterly conference call last April, the company said it planned to open only 25 stores this year, half of the 50 it opened last year."

So in addition to opening the 25 stores, they are going to remodel about 100 of them. And along with this, they are doing a little makeover of the "One To One" program they started as a means to get people to switch to Mac. As it stands now, you can sign up for the program for $99.00 USD per year, and get as many one hour training sessions on Apple products as you want. And anyone can sign up for this program, until June 1st that is when they change it to allow only people purchasing Macs to sign up and current members to renew. They are also expanding the number of hours for each session from one to three, but with the potential of having up to three people in each session. Kind of changes what One to One means doesn't it? At any rate, it doesn't sound like a bad deal if you live close enough to an Apple store to get your money's worth out of the training. And they keep track of all your training, including notes and videos, on your own person "One to One" page. Not too bad for 100 bucks a year US.

"At long last, you can now buy an iPhone 3G via the online Apple Store and have it hand-delivered by your local FedEx guy directly to your domicile-presuming you meet certain criteria."

In yet another policy change, you can get your iphone shipped to you, if you are a new customer to AT&T. Current AT&T customers still have to come into the Apple Store or AT&T to get theirs. They can, however, reserve one online, they just have to pickup at the brick and mortar store of their choice. This is sure to be added to the "clearing the inventory" theory in the anticipation of a new iPhone announcement.

"Among the 175 most-photographed landmarks on earth, Apple's Fifth Avenue (NYC) store has risen to fame the quickest, beating out Wrigley Field (Chicago), Buckingham Palace (London) and even the White House (DC). According to researchers from Cornell University who studied over 33.3 million Flickr photographs, the iconic glass cube of the Fifth Avenue store was the fifth most-photographed landmark in New York City, which is the world's most-photographed city"

Interesting study but it is a pretty dry read. But if you are interested, they have published the results of the study as well as the photo mapping they used to complete the study. They used something called "mean-shift clustering" to get the top seven most photographed landmarks on Earth, as well as the top seven in each of the top 25 metropolitan areas. I don't exactly know what "mean-shift clustering" is but they fully explain it in the report they presented at a Web conference in Spain last week. New York city was the most distinctive tag they found, and the top five landmarks worldwide were, in order, Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, Tate Modern art museum in London, Big Ben and Notre Dame. In case you are curious, the Apple Store on 5th Avenue was number 5 on the list under New York City landmarks. The top 4 were, in order, Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Plaza and Grand Central Station.

"My current city of Chicago isn't really suffering for Apple Stores -- the one on Michigan Avenue kind of makes up for any other missed areas around here, as it's the nicest and biggest one I've seen (but then again, I haven't been to the ones in New York near Mr. Rose). But it's good to hear that we're going to be getting another store, this one a little bit outside the Loop, on the city's northside."

So after dropping plans to build a store on State Street in downtown Chicago, Apple signed a lease recently for 18,000 square-feet of land at 1560 N. Halsted Street in Chicago. The store is expected to be approximately 15,000 square-feet when it is completed in early 2010. Plenty of access as the location intersects a couple of bus lines as well as the Red Line (rail system).

"Observations made at more than two dozen Apple retail stores over the last few weeks show Apple to be maintaining healthy sales of Macs and iPhones that aren't far off from rates seen during the lead-in to last year's holiday shopping season. The findings are the latest to suggest the Cupertino-based Mac and electronics maker remains better positioned than most to weather the brunt of an ongoing economic crunch that has seen consumers rein in their budgets and put novelty and non-critical purchases on hold for a brighter day."

According to the study done by Piper Jaffry analyst Gene Munster and his team, they spent an average of 25 hours in retail stores at various locations around the U.S. They did some averaging and figured out that the stores are selling an average of 22 iPhone 3Gs, 28 Macs and about 50 iPods (various models I assume since they didn't specify) per day. The stores are 8 off the mark of 36 Macs per day and 6 off the 28 iPhones per day figure from the last study in November 2008.

"The economy may be uncertain, but Apple isn't hesitant to open another New York retail store where the average household income is three times the national average. This fall a store will open at the Americana Manhasset mall, in the town of the same name whose small size (pop. 8,300) belies its average household income of $125,240 a year."

Photo Credit: Apple, Crabtree Valley Mall, NC

This store is due to open in October 2009, but some stores have been put on the back-burner, for now at least. The proposed store in Minnesota at Grand Place in St. Paul apparently has been delayed. This is based on information from the job postings list at Apple, which shows openings at this location "inactive." In other store news, Apple is planning on continuing expansion outside the U.S. with store openings planned for October 2009 in Canada, one store in Germany and two more stores in the UK.

"Apple has joined AT&T in offering iPhones without a contract at a hefty price. Last week, AT&T announced plans to sell iPhone 3Gs without a two-year contract for $599 and $699, but Apple did not respond to inquiries as to whether it had the same idea in mind. Now AppleInsider is reporting that the company has indeed rolled out the similar no-contact offer at its stores, which makes sense, given the tight partnership between the two companies."

AT&T is actually doing Apple one better by selling the iPhone 3G at the subsidized prices of $199 USD for 8 Gig and $299 USD for 16 Gigs, with a two-year extension on the contract of course. Small detail. Apple competes with this by not limiting the customer to just one iPhone. This just adds fuel to the rumor of a new iPhone in June, since last year the same type of thing was done to get inventory levels down prior to the launch of the iPhone 3G. We shall see!

"Despite many other companies releasing employees during the current economic situation, Apple always stated they had no plans to show any employees the door. But now it seems that for both business and financial reasons, they've had to let 50 employees go, according to CNET News."

CNET refers to two reports by ValleyWag and 9to5mac that state 50 employees were laid off. An entire sales staff in Austin, TX and several at the Apple Campus in Cupertino, CA were the casualties of "business and economic" problems. This was denied by Apple, even though several sites were reporting similar information. The start of this bagan last year when Apple de-emphasized the direct enterprise sales force in favor of using resellers and channel partners to get the products out there into the hands of businesses. It appears to be working as this recent article in Apple Thoughts noted.

On the Apple Store side of things, they seem to be cooking right along. According to www.ifoAppleStore.com, Apple is planning a 2nd store in Scotland, a new store in the Boston area, have started construction on a 5th store in Toronto, and are close to getting plans approved for the Georgetown store. Oh and don't forget the recently opened Greensboro, NC store.

We all know what this means, right? Rumors have been flying for everything from new iMacs to new Mac Pros to new Time Capsules, AirPort Extreme Base Stations, to the long-awaited new Mac Mini. Of course, this could just be maintenance on the store.

Is it me or do we Apple fans get a bit nutty when that yellow stickie note shows up on the store's home page?