Apple Retail
In 2001 Apple opened two shops in shopping malls and the press gave them two years to fail. A quarter-century later there are more than five hundred, and a few of them are the most photographed buildings in their cities. Here’s where they are, when they showed up, and the ones that stopped being shops and turned into landmarks.
The fleet, filling in
Eight stores in 2001. A few hundred by the Genius Bar era. Then a decade of glass boxes on high streets everywhere. Press play and watch the United States build a lead it never gave back, while China goes from its first store in 2010 to second place in ten years.
Counts are approximate, compiled from Apple’s announcements, 10-K filings and public reporting · updated 2026-07-04
Where they are
Select any state to see every Apple Store there. Each store name links to its current page on Apple’s site.
US locations and counts come from Apple’s current store directory, checked July 9, 2026. Select a state for the complete list. Not affiliated with Apple.
The ones I’ve walked into
Wherever I travel I end up photographing the local Apple Store, not to shop, really, but to look at the building. Over twenty years and a dozen cities I have collected a lot of these, from the glass cube on Fifth Avenue to a store tucked under the Louvre. Here are the best of them, with what I know about each.
The most photographed store Apple has ever built, and the whole shop is underground. From the street all you see is a 32-foot cube of glass with a floating logo. This is the 2019 rebuild: fifteen panes of glass to a face, where the 2006 original used ninety.
Apple took the whole northeast balcony of Grand Central in 2011. There is no logo on the marble and almost no walls, just wooden tables under the terminal’s 1913 painted sky. It may be the least Apple-looking Apple Store, which is exactly why it works.
Foster + Partners, 2017. The roof is a single sheet of carbon fibre, thin as a MacBook lid and shaped like one, floating over walls of glass. The store steps down the riverbank to the water, really a public staircase with an Apple Store attached.
A glass box at North Avenue and Halsted. It opened in 2010 and closed in 2018 once the Michigan Avenue store could carry the city, so this storefront is already history. Glad I stopped in.
Boston’s flagship, on Boylston Street in Back Bay: three floors of glass with a staircase hung inside. Shot on a very New England grey day in the spring of 2010.
For twelve years Apple’s San Francisco flagship sat on Stockton Street, a block off Union Square: a stone box with the logo cut clean through the front, and a spiral glass staircase rising under a round skylight. It closed in 2016 when the Union Square store opened. These are from my first visit in 2004 and again in 2010.
An open-air shopping street in Glendale (town green, trolley, a clock) with an Apple Store facing all of it. Half a mile away, inside the Glendale Galleria, stands one of the two stores Apple opened on its very first day, back in May 2001.
Rebuilt in 2023 as a free-standing glass pavilion, with keyhole arches that pick up the outdoor centre’s Moroccan theme. Olive trees outside, and a very sunny place to buy a phone.
Apple’s store in the open-air Westfield UTC centre, up the hill from La Jolla. Since the mall’s rebuild it’s a free-standing stone box fronted by a single wall of glass onto the plaza: floating logo, no signage, Jo Malone for a neighbour. A bright San Diego afternoon, with the usual small crowd gathered at the door.
Not every store is a landmark. This is the plain mall store, shot five years apart. The 2011 photo still has the iCloud cloud on the wall; that is how you date it.
Apple’s Hawaii store: grey stone under a wall of glass, screened by a row of palm trees. About as far from Cupertino as the company gets, and it feels like it.
Apple’s Montréal store on Rue Sainte-Catherine, photographed in 2022. Apple has since moved it a block west into a restored heritage building, so this particular glass front is now the old one.
The strangest setting of any store here: underground, in the Louvre’s shopping concourse, right beside I. M. Pei’s inverted glass pyramid, La Pyramide Inversée. The travertine and the daylight through the pyramid make it feel less like a shop than a wing of the museum.
Apple’s first store in Hong Kong, opened 2011 on the harbour side of the ifc mall in Central. On a clear day the tables look straight out over Victoria Harbour.
In the base of the Hysan Place tower, a sheer wall of glass on Hennessy Road in Causeway Bay, one of the busiest shopping districts on earth, and the crowds show it.
Stores on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s great shopping spine: a glass lantern set into the pedestrian street, glowing after dark. The West Nanjing Road store here is the earlier one; Apple has reshaped its Shanghai lineup several times since.
Shanghai’s glass-cylinder flagship: a drum of curved glass rising out of a sunken plaza at the foot of the Oriental Pearl Tower, in the heart of Pudong. A spiral stair takes you down into the store below.
A glass cylinder threaded with a spiral staircase, dropping down through the floors of a mall near Wangfujing. I didn’t write down the store name; the tube of glass I remember perfectly.
Past the Wangfujing cylinder, Beijing kept opening stores. A few more I walked past.
Not every photo came with a note. A wall of storefronts from the road: a few I can name, a few I’d only be guessing at.
And what the stores looked like on the inside, from the Power Mac years to the Today at Apple ones.
All 77 photographs in this section are my own, taken on visits since 2004 and self-hosted here. Stores were identified from each photo’s embedded GPS and the landmarks in frame; where a location is uncertain the caption says so. Not affiliated with Apple.
Worth a detour
A 32-foot glass cube over Fifth Avenue. A carbon-fibre roof shaped like a MacBook lid, stepping down to the Chicago River. A glass sphere that floats on Singapore’s bay. Somewhere along the way Apple stopped opening shops and started commissioning buildings.
How it happened
