Apple is trying out a new retail store experience that puts express pickup of online orders and Genius Bar appointments front and center, while keeping customer and staff safety paramount during the ongoing global health crisis.
Images credited to PopVox co-founder and CEO Marci Harris via Twitter
Dubbed "Apple Express," the temporary retail format for brick-and-mortar stores is being trialed at Apple Burlingame in California. The location has an interior storefront hub with a partition at the entrance that includes serving counters with perspex window shielding, central display cases with popular accessories for purchase, and a surrounding wall that screens off the shop floor proper.
Black spots on the floor in front of the temporary facade indicate where visiting customers should stand in order to observe social distancing measures. Based on the pictures, the system allows one customer at a time to come up to each serving window, while customers with pre-booked appointments can queue up outside.
Customers are required to have their appointment-assigned QR code and government-issued ID ready as they wait for the next available Apple representative, while another sign displays QR codes that link to Apple's support app and official website.
It's not clear if Apple plans to expand the "Apple Express" retail system shown here to other stores within California or to other U.S. states, but if the trial proves successful we could well see it rolled out across the country as the U.S. continues to grapple with the pandemic.
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Thursday November 27, 2025 1:01 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
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Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When...
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Don't worry. This super deadly virus (haha, yeah right) will be gone after the election.
I wonder how Apple in Sweden is handling things, given that they never shut their country down, nor mandated masks. They’re now at or near heard immunity and probably one of the safest countries now.
Cool, denialism and misinformation already.
No, Sweden is not at or near herd immunity. We don't even know whether herd immunity is possible without a vaccine. (How's that herd immunity going for all the various colds out there?)
And, if you still somehow don't understand why COVID-19 is dangerous, at this point you can even hear the words straight from our dear leader's mouth, if that's all you'll believe. (He would never admit it publicly, of course, but nevertheless he is on tape doing so.)
Says the person afraid of a virus that 99% of people survive. Macrumors is full of people that need a "safe space". I've learned to accept it. Sorry if you require therapy after reading my reply. :)
I'm glad you've learned to accept the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with many more to come, but the rest of us aren't so callous.
Malaria kills about 500,000 people every year but we never shut down the world because of it.
If people took COVID-19 seriously, we wouldn't need to shut down at this point. But regardless, COVID-19 has also killed about 1 million people in 6 months, and it's hardly finished.
