Inside the new Australian Apple store

Apple will today launch its first official Australian store in the Sydney CBD – and, according to SmartCompany Business Tech Talk blogger Paul Wallbank, it more than lives up to the hype.

Wallbank says the two-floor store on Sydney’s George Street, which will open at 5pm tomorrow, is comparable to Apple’s innovative retail outlets in New York.

“It’s very open, airy, light and really quite impressive,” Wallbank says. “It’s certainly very different to any other computer store you’ll see and I think a lot better than other flagship stores such as the Telstra T.Life store across the road.”

Apple’s move to establish a presence in Australia will also throw out the challenge to its competitors in the IT sector, particularly given the high level of service available in the store. Mac users will be able to make bookings to speak with what Apple calls its “geniuses” – in effect, in-house tech support that means users will often be able to have computer problems fixed for little or no charge.

“That level of support is quite atypical – Apple has got big fat margins so they can do things like this. Competitors like Dell and HP have chased the bottom end of the market and so they don’t have the margins to afford this kind of service even if they want to,” Wallbank says.

Apple now operates 215 retail stores in six countries including Australia, the US, Britain, Japan, Canada and Italy.

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