Apple doesn't plan to offer the Apple Watch for sale in its retail stores on Friday, having opted to restrict orders to online purchases only, but some retail stores around the world will have Apple Watches in stock for customers to purchase on April 24.
Several high-end fashion boutiques will be offering the watch for sale beginning Friday, according to a new report from The New York Times. Stores with stock will include Dover Street Market in Tokyo and London, Maxfield in Los Angeles, Colette in Paris, the Corner in Berlin, and 10 Corso Como in Milan.
All of these stores were previously unveiled as retail locations that would carry the Apple Watch, but it was not known that the stores would have stock for customers to purchase on launch day, given the Apple Watch supply constraints that Apple has highlighted. In a press release sent out on April 9, Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts said "strong customer demand" would exceed supply at launch.
Many of the stores have the Apple Watch displayed prominently on their websites, along with wording that says the device will be available in store as of Friday. As noted by The New York Times, all of the places that will have the Apple Watch in stock on Friday are high-end fashion-oriented boutiques known as "retail trendsetters."
It's not known exactly how much stock each of the stores will be given or of what type, but Dover Street Market did share some detail on its numbers. The store in Ginza, Tokyo will have 350 watches to sell, while the store in London will have 570. Neither store will offer the Apple Watch Edition, as it is backordered.
Apple initially declined to comment on its partner stores offering in-store Apple Watch stock while its own retail stores will not, but later reiterated its earlier comment on getting online orders out to customers earlier than expected. The first Apple Watch shipments will be arriving on the doorsteps of customers beginning on April 24, and as of today, many Apple Watch orders that had shipping estimates ranging into several weeks have seen their shipments advance into the "Preparing for Shipment" stage.
Monday October 27, 2025 7:55 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
The upcoming iOS 26.1 update includes a handful of new features and changes for iPhones, including a toggle for changing the appearance of the Liquid Glass design, "slide to stop" for alarms in the Clock app, and more.
Below, we outline key details about iOS 26.1.
Release Date
Given that Apple has yet to seed an iOS 26.1 Release Candidate, which is typically the final beta version, the...
Monday October 27, 2025 4:51 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple is designing an updated version of the Apple TV 4K, and rumors suggest that it could come out sometime in the next couple of months. We're not expecting a major overhaul with design changes, but even a simple chip upgrade will bring major improvements to Apple's set-top box.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
We've rounded up all the latest Apple TV rumors.
...
Apple Maps could feature integrated ads as soon as next year, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports.
In his latest "Power On" newsletter, Gurman said that Apple's plan to bring more ads to iOS is moving "gaining traction," with the Maps app being next in line. The project will apparently give restaurants and other businesses the option to pay to have their details featured more prominently in...
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Apple is about to drop iOS 26.1, the first major point release since iOS 26 was rolled out in September, and there are at least six notable changes and improvements to look forward to. We've rounded them up below.
Apple has already provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate version of iOS 26.1, which means Apple will likely roll out the update to all compatible...
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In the fourth iOS 26.1 beta, Apple added a "Tinted" option that reduces the translucency of Liquid Glass for those who prefer a more opaque look. I saw some comments wondering whether the setting might preserve battery life, so I thought I'd do some testing.
Test Settings
I did four separate tests using the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and I kept the parameters as similar as possible. Here are the...
Monday October 27, 2025 9:15 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple this month refreshed the 14-inch MacBook Pro base model with its new M5 chip, and higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are expected to follow in early 2026. However, these machines will represent the final update to the current design, with Apple reportedly developing a completely new version of the MacBook Pro packed with next-generation hardware...
Tuesday October 28, 2025 1:07 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate versions of upcoming iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, macOS Tahoe 26.1, tvOS 26.1, watchOS 26.1, and visionOS 26.1 updates for testing purposes. The RCs betas come a week after Apple released the fourth betas.
The new betas can be downloaded from the Settings app on a compatible device by going to General > Software...
Wednesday October 22, 2025 6:15 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
The upcoming iOS 26.1 update includes a handful of new features and changes for iPhones, including a toggle for changing the appearance of the Liquid Glass design, "slide to stop" for alarms in the Clock app, and more.
iOS 26.1 is currently in beta testing. The update will likely be released in the first half of November, and it is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer, but some...
The first preview release of the Swift SDK for Android was published this week, allowing developers to build Android apps in Swift with official tooling and making it easier to share code across iOS and Android.
The SDK enables Android apps to be built in Swift using officially supported tooling rather than community workarounds. In June, it was announced that Apple's Swift programming...
Angela Ahrendts clearly doesn't understand Apple customers and their passion for pretty much ANYTHING Apple releases.
Making us either stay up until all hours of the night, or wake up to preorder Apple Watch so we MIGHT have it on our wrists April 24th is one thing, but then going and allowing certain stores to have it in stock on launch day is a slap in the face.
This isn't Burberry, get on the program Angela. Don't mess with a good thing.
A few hundred happy customers who can get to these 2 stores, but hundreds of thousands of unhappy customers who ordered weeks ago but have been put behind them in the queue ... Angela Ahrendts is really making a mess of this launch.
What's wrong with sending a few hundred watches to 4 or 5 fashion boutiques on a launch date? That's enough to send a grand total of 4 or 5 watches to each of their own retail stores. Would that have made the Apple fans happier?
That in itself isn't a problem.
What is a problem is having her tell the world that Apple Watch will only be available online for the first few months, making people wait months for a watch, and then announcing "yeah, you can buy them here."
That's pretty misleading. She really screwed this up.
