Michael is a Creative Editor who covered Apple Retail and design on 9to5Mac. His stories highlighted the work of talented artists, designers, and customers through a unique lens of architecture, creativity, and community.
Contact Michael on Twitter to share Apple Retail, design, and history stories: @MichaelSteeber
While Apple continues to globally expand its retail footprint, Chinese stores have seen slowing growth over the past several years. A new report from The Information attempts to explain Apple’s multi-faceted struggle in China as legal issues, fraud, competitors, and high standards hamper rapid expansion.
It’s a bittersweet time for Apple fans in Paris. Apple Carrousel du Louvre, the company’s first retail store in France, just closed permanently after nine years of service and just two days of iPhone XR sales. While the announcement came as a disappointment to Parisian tourists and locals, a new store experience is just around the corner. In the meantime, we’ve taken a nostalgic look back to remember the famous store’s history.
In London, Apple has breathed new life into one of its largest stores. Apple Covent Garden reopened today after four months of renovations, welcoming iPhone XR customers and debuting a refreshed design that brings the company’s current retail vision into focus while maintaining the store’s historic character. Coinciding with the updates is a month of new creative sessions and performances for Londoners.
As 2018 winds down, many of Apple’s in-progress retail projects are beginning to wrap up. Overnight, the company announced online that its store at Southlake Town Square in Southlake, Texas will reopen on Saturday, November 3rd at 10:00 A.M
Apple has officially announced that its first retail store in Thailand will open next month at Bangkok’s upcoming Iconsiam mall. The store will overlook the Chao Phraya River in a centrally located space with excellent visibility on the face of the massive new structure.
If you’d like to watch next week’s Apple Special Event on a bit larger display with a group of friends, you might be in luck. Select Apple stores around the world will be live streaming the keynote, and you can sign up to attend.
Apple’s third store in Japan to feature modern styling opens alongside the release of the iPhone XR this Friday. Before customers begin lining up, Apple Shibuya’s design details have been revealed. The renovations represent the culmination of 11 months of construction work during which two more stores opened in Japan.
Popular design and prototyping tool Figma is today announcing support for the macOS-based UI animation software Principle. The integration will allow Figma designs to be imported into Principle, where designers can add advanced animations to their app prototypes.
It’s widely known that Apple Park Visitor Center offers highly-coveted custom merchandise for guests. The curated selection of T-shirts, caps, souvenirs, and more isn’t available to purchase at any other Apple store or online. Even the old Infinite Loop campus has a separate line of gear. Today, Apple updated its T-shirt selection at the Visitor Center for fall with some designs that long-time fans might remember.
Many of the most culturally significant metropolitan centers in the United States — like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco — are home to the latest prominent Apple retail stores. Los Angeles has long been an exception, lacking a downtown location of any kind. That’s set to change, as Apple has confirmed plans to establish a major presence at the Tower Theatre in L.A.’s Broadway Theater District. The new store will undoubtedly drive increased foot traffic and new development in the city’s historic core, transforming the culture around it. 9to5Mac visited the Broadway District to document the Tower Theatre’s condition before Apple’s renovation and the downtown community as it exists today.
On Monday, Adobe unveiled Photoshop CC for iPad, one of the most ambitious third-party software projects we’ve ever seen for iOS. With over 28 years of history on the Mac, moving to a new platform is no easy feat. Photoshop’s breadth of tools makes it essential to the workflows of many creative professionals. Even though it won’t ship until next year, there’s already considerable interest and numerous questions from curious iPad users and Photoshop fans about the upcoming app. 9to5Mac talked with Photoshop’s Senior Product Manager Jenny Lyell to learn more about Adobe’s goals for Photoshop on iPad and to clear up a few pressing questions.
At MAX 2018, Adobe today held its annual Sneaks event, where early and upcoming macOS and iOS software features are previewed for the first time. While these technologies don’t always end up in shipping software, they often inform future product development at the very least. This year, 10 sneak previews were shown off in various stages of development.
Apple’s enthusiasm for its retail expansion in Japan hasn’t been tempered. First in Shinjuku and later Kyoto, the company celebrated each of this year’s store openings with custom graphics and promotional videos. 2018’s new stores were even teased ahead of an official announcement to build excitement. Apple’s visual spectacle continues for its October 26th store reopening in Shibuya, which was announced yesterday evening. For the first time, a new store for 2019 has also been teased.
Since 2014’s “Prototyping: Fake It Till You Make It” WWDC session, Apple’s Keynote app has become a popular tool for designers and developers looking to make quick and easy app prototypes and concepts. Alongside the rise of Keynote, several other dedicated prototyping tools have grown in popularity as user experience design gains traction as an essential part of the app development and design process. One of those tools is Adobe XD, formally launched as part of Creative Cloud during 2017’s Adobe MAX conference and updated yesterday with voice prototyping.
Now that the application has had a year to mature and grow a more robust feature set, I asked Adobe how Keynote users looking to explore in-depth prototyping can easily make the jump to a more powerful tool.
As 2018 winds down, Apple plans to fulfill its promise of three retail store openings in Japan by the end of the year. After 11 months of renovation work, Apple Shibuya is set to reopen October 26th.
Premiere Rush CC is Adobe’s new quick and easy video editing solution for online content creators. The cross-device app debuted today after an early preview this past June. We’ve detailed the announcement in a separate post here, but I’ve had some hands-on time with the new software over the past several days to see how it performs.
In conjunction with the announcement of Photoshop for iPad, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller made a surprise appearance at this morning’s Adobe MAX keynote in Los Angeles. Speaking with Adobe’s Scott Belsky, Schiller expressed his support for the upcoming release of Photoshop as well as Adobe’s continued commitment to augmented reality.
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The ultimate goal of a creative tool is to foster seamless innovation and collaboration. Adobe understands this, having built its brand on industry-leading creative products for decades. But how do you evolve a brand to become more approachable to a larger audience? For many tech companies of late, brand illustrations have proved successful. When a logo or wordmark isn’t personal enough, illustrations help bridge the gap between a product and a user, becoming part of a brand identity. Today Adobe is rolling out a fresh illustration style for here that will begin to populate its tools and services. 9to5Mac took an inside look at the process of reimagining the aesthetics of tools that creative professionals rely on every day.
A full, desktop-class version of Photoshop on iOS has been one of the most hotly anticipated creative apps for designers and artists since the original iPad’s introduction in 2010. In the years since, competitors have released their own products hoping to fill the void, but can’t offer true integration with Creative Cloud that existing Photoshop customer have come to expect. Today at 2018’s Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, Adobe is answering the requests of the creative community by previewing what it calls real Photoshop CC for iPad.
Adobe MAX 2018, Adobe’s annual creativity conference, kicks off today in Los Angeles. Headlining the week are updates to Creative Cloud Mac apps, powerful new iPad software, and entirely new cross-platform experiences built on Creative Cloud. 9to5Mac is in attendance and will be bringing you continued coverage and deep dives of everything new this week. Let’s take a closer look at today’s Creative Cloud updates.
New cooperation between two Swedish political parties has put Apple’s plan to establish a significant retail store in the heart of Stockholm in serious jeopardy. During a press conference held Friday at Stockholm’s City Hall, leaders expressed their wishes to cancel Apple’s project.
Following four months of remodeling and modernization, Apple’s expansive retail store at London’s Covent Garden will reopen on Friday, October 26th. The reveal is timed to coincide with the launch of the colorful new iPhone XR.
Larger displays are the headline feature of the Apple Watch Series 4 and iPhone XS Max. To spotlight the new screens, Apple has created large displays of another kind – in storefront windows.
In July, Apple announced that its first-party print products would be discontinued at the end of September. The news took me by surprise. While features like iCloud shared albums and Photos app Memories have lessened the need to make books and prints, I still regarded the service fondly.
Over the years, books and calendars from Photos on my Mac (and earlier, iPhoto) have made great gifts and keepsakes for family members and myself. To commemorate the end of an era, I decided to make one last hardcover photo book and theme it around a topic I love, and where many people learned about the Photos print service for the first time: Apple retail stores. My book arrived today.