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.
The Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City.
(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET)Even if it is a high-end retail outpost for Macs, iPhones, and iPods, that's an impressive amount of money coming in when seemingly every retailer was clobbered by the arrival of the current recession. By comparison, the SoHo Apple Store rakes in about $100 million per year, according to the Post. And one of Apple's newest locations, in the prime shopping district of the ritzy California coastal town of Santa Barbara, is expected to pull in $20 million annually.
It's interesting insight into the company's flagship location, since Apple does not break out individual stores' take. The company did report in its second-quarter earnings filing that its 252 stores worldwide brought in $1.47 billion collectively for the quarter.
All of this explains why the company has not stopped investing in its retail presence. Apple's senior vice president of retail, Ron Johnson, said last week that 100 of its stores will be remodeled this year to allow for bigger displays and room for customer training courses.
The shopping frenzy at the tourist-clogged Fifth Avenue location isn't like to abate anytime soon, particularly if Apple releases new iPhone hardware next month, as is widely expected.
This MacBook at the 14th St. Apple Store in New York could load Facebook just fine. Taken, naturally, on my iPhone.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)NEW YORK--It involved three shopping districts, two subway lines, and a whole lot of walking in the freezing cold. But I completed my mission to hit up all three Manhattan Apple stores to see if it was true that the retail outlets' computer stations had blocked access to Facebook because too many people were using the popular social network to waste time. (Editors' note: at publish time, the link above was experiencing a network time-out error.)
The verdict: An Apple Store representative told me in a phone call later on Friday, "We have not blocked Facebook from our stores." But it looks like some stores may have put a block in place on their own accord.
Apple retail stores are famously stocked with Internet-accessible workstations that, while intended to be used as demonstrations for prospective buyers, are also free for the public to use. That's led to some problems with nonshoppers monopolizing the machines and taking up space: in mid-2007, Apple blocked access to MySpace, which was then the world's biggest social-networking site.
I hit up Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship store in midtown (you know, the big glass cube), the 14th Street store in the Meatpacking District, and the store on Prince Street in the downtown neighborhood of SoHo.
At the Fifth Avenue store, I was able to access Facebook from one laptop, but on another, the facebook.com domain redirected to an Apple Store page. In the Meatpacking District store, meanwhile, two laptops loaded Facebook without a problem, but a desktop computer brought up a message explaining that the parental controls feature in the Safari browser had blocked it.
In the SoHo store, meanwhile, I had no problem accessing Facebook from any of the random computers I checked out. Ironically, it was in the SoHo store that was populated by the most people who clearly weren't customers; by the time I swung by, it was lunch hour at a local high school, and the computers were occupied by teenagers checking out games and music.
So, what it looks like is that even if there is no nationwide ban of Facebook at Apple stores as some had speculated, a few individual stores have chosen to go their own route.
This post was updated at 1:05 p.m. PT with comment from Apple.
The New York City school system has refused to accept any more iMac shipments until Apple fixes a Wi-Fi flaw, according to a report.
MacBook shipments are on hold to Big Apple schools until the other Apple fixes a Wi-Fi problem.
(Credit: Apple)MacNN is reporting that the city's Department of Education has instructed Dell Managed Services, which is apparently the DOE's IT partner, to stop all iMac shipments until Apple fixes a Wi-Fi connectivity issue. The exact nature of the issue wasn't explained in MacNN's report, which cited an e-mail from Apple to school faculty apologizing for the problems.
It's unclear how long this problem has been going on, but AppleInsider reported that some shipments have been on hold for almost two months, which was right around the time Apple shipped the 10.5.2 release of Leopard. A News.com reader directed us to several discussions on Apple's user forums regarding Leopard Wi-Fi problems that go back as far as November.
AppleInsider also believes that Apple is getting set to fix the Wi-Fi flaw in the next release of Mac OS X Leopard, which will be 10.5.3. That's expected sometime in the next few weeks, although signs have appeared that the update will be here sooner rather than later, as Apple also works to correct a QuickTime flaw with that release.
An Apple spokesman said the company is looking into the issue. If you have been running into any kind of Wi-Fi connectivity problems with your Leopard machine, let us know.
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