Apple Building New Flagship Retail Store in Palo Alto

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By introducing its retail stores and continuously investing in their expansion, Apple reinvented the electronics shopping experience for tech fans. There’s hardly any gadget store chain in the world capable to draw similar crowds, as Apple’s stores are not only admired but also very profitable.

Recently, Apple expanded its retail store collection with a new crown jewel, the Grand Central Terminal store in New York, and the company is now working on a new project, a “prototype” store located closer to home, in Palo Alto, California.

The company will apparently invest $3.15 million in the construction of a brand new two-story, 15,030-square foot building designed by architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski. The retail store will sport a glass roof similar to the one found in the Upper West Side Apple store in New York, with the most important characteristic being something you wouldn’t expect, acting as a community pillar. Or, in simpler words, Apple could serve coffee in this particular store, according to existing speculation.

CNET suggests that this particular Apple retail store could offer certain unexpected features, that the company envisioned before acquiring NeXT and hiring Steve Jobs as CEO:

That last little bit [“acting as a ‘commons for community to gather’”] makes the store a little more intriguing considering Apple’s early retail ambitions. It could just be a friendly PR tagline, but in 1996–several years before the first retail store would ever open its doors–Apple had a very different plan in mind to get its brand out there. Cybercafes, with their high-speed Internet access, software libraries, and nearby patrons and support staff were popping up in cities around the world.

That year, Apple announced it would be joining forces with the Landmark Entertainment Group and Mega Bytes International to collaborate on state-of-the-art cybercafes in Los Angeles, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Sydney, Australia. There visitors would be able to surf the Web, grab a snack, and use Apple’s latest hardware and software.

Apple has managed to build some unique retail store designs in the recent years, not to mention its recently unveiled plans for its future campus, so it will certainly be interesting to see what this Palo Alto “prototype” will have to offer to faithful customers on top of the genius bar, the training sessions and all the products and accessories the company is selling. Unfortunately, actual renders of the future Palo Alto retail store are not yet available at this time