Tabletops: Open secret
Tabletops: Open secret
A new Apple Store opened on Saturday! Louisiana's Apple Lakeside Shopping Center — one of only two stores in the state — moved to a brand new space inside the mall.
It was an uncharacteristically quiet opening for a beautiful new store. In fact, it almost feels like it was kept a secret. Perhaps I should be careful what I wish for. Instead of reusing that same logo again, Apple chose to acknowledge the event only by adding a disclaimer-sized notice at the top of the store webpage just 24 hours before opening. With some luck, maybe we'll still get an Instagram team photo yet today. 🤞
With that in mind, please forgive my failed attempt to track down more than this single photo posted online from opening day:
This is an important opening for Apple Retail. The store is only the fourth next generation (Vintage D.2) location in the world. For the moment, it's the only store in the United States with the latest iPhone case bay. And that old Lakeside Shopping Center store? It was way too tiny to serve all of New Orleans. This is a huge upgrade!
Hard work deserves recognition, so it would to be a shame to let this moment pass silently. A massive effort is required to design, build, and open any Apple Store.
There are no quiet product launches (heck, even the USB-C to Apple Pencil Adapter made it into a press release), which makes it even more baffling to me that this has been the most subdued store opening since Apple Reston's covid-necessitated silent move in July 2020.
If you find any more photos from Metairie, send them my way and I'll happily share them next week so we can take a more in-depth look.
Footnote
By the way, it's worth noting that D.C.'s Apple Georgetown temporarily closed last week for renovations. I'm expecting this upgrade to be very similar to the work that was recently completed at Apple Downtown Brooklyn — not customer-facing.
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Apple 信義 A13
Photo via @taiwanhotline on Instagram.