Big Mac day yesterday, the last day of the Mac Expo UK and the opening of the Apple Store in London. First stop was the Expo, which as usual was the same small affair in the Islington Business Design Center. What is spooky is that I have been going to the same show for about 3 years now, and the stand location for the majority of exhibitors never changes. In fact in some cases the things they have are the same.
Having said that were a few changes this year, MS and Adobe had swapped, the gamers area was bigger. The volume of people attending the show was not massive, but the place was quite busy. Apple were not selling anything at the show themselves instead they were telling people to go to the new Apple Store in Regent Street.
So we headed there. I think the number of people at the Apple Store was quite impressive we had to queue for 10 minutes just to get in, on top of that they were controlling the flow of people through the doors, crowd control and fire safety reasons I guess.
Unfortunately I did not have a camera with me (I’m not one of those people who has a camera 24×7.) otherwise I would have taken some pictures. (Yeah I know I have a camera phone, I guess I just couldn’t be asked 
) Any how from the outside the shop front is very bright, you can see the Apple signs from either side of Regent Street and from both sides. Inside the layout is very much like the New York Soho store although in scale terms it is most definately larger. The stair case is exactly like the ones used at the other Apple Store, design consistancy and image reason which are Apple traits I guess.
The queues at the tills were quite long I think everyone was buying iPods or iPod accessories. People were walking away with G5′s, iMacs, Powerbooks and iBooks, so I think they did a fair bit of business just on the first day. Just so that I did not feel left out I got the Applecare pack for the iPod, so that I could get my battery swapped out under warranty. Still looking into how this is going to be done in the next couple of days, soundd like a bit of phone time to Dublin is going to be needed.
It will be interesting to see how successful Apple are with their own retail outlets in Europe. At the Expo I was speaking to a few retailers that when asked about the Apple Store made some negative comments about Apple’s plan. Since of course the smaller Mac retailers are going to be hit quite hard by Apple’s move into the retail side. I guess only time will tell. Apple faced the same problem in the US when they started to open stores in the US over 18 months ago. As I understand it some legal action in California is still taking place.
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