Filed under: Retail
60 "iStores" will open across India
There's a huge push in India right now by Reliance Digital to open 60 iStores across the nation's top twenty cities. The iStores will sell Apple products exclusively, and carry the full line, from consumer products to pro hardware.Expect to see all sixty stores up and running within the next 18 months. We wonder how the interior design will look, and if it will resemble official Apple Stores.
If you visit one of these stores, please let us know! We'll be happy to share your photos and stories.
Thanks, Ravi!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jon said 8:07AM on 3-07-2008
Fun coincidence, I'm in Bangalore for work for the week and just ran into one of these at the mall. I had wondered what it was. As for your question, they do have similar trimmings to an Apple Store, and a similar setup. I don't remember if the employees were wearing black or not--my attention was fixed on the two Tibetan monks checking out the Macbook Pro. Sorry, no pictures.
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aerove said 8:24AM on 3-07-2008
hey! i've already been to the one in Hyd.. i ll go again tomorrow to get some accesories for my mbp.. i ll try takin pics.. its not huge by any means but gud enuf to have one in my city!
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Pete Ware said 9:05AM on 3-07-2008
Hopefully they won't look like the shoebox stores in Canada.
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manish said 9:08AM on 3-07-2008
Let's hope so or it could be another case of Reliance just talking smack...
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Nick Soper said 9:39AM on 3-07-2008
We have an "iStore" down in Cape Town. It started out as pretty small, about 3 meters wide by about 12 meters deep but it was nice to see South Africa getting a taste of a fully fledged Apple Store.
They have since moved to bigger premises, and resembles an Apple Store pretty well with all the gadgets available to play with and look at. They also have a sudo conference center in the back of the store with a set of 5 X 5 white bar stool styled seats with mini backs to them and (what must be a 60") Big screen on the wall and an Apple branded pedestal.
Stock is always a problem, but we do get stuff about a week after the US have it these days. (We were lucky with Leopard and got it the same day - while peeps in the US were asleep dreaming of the Leopard release).
Moral of the story, the Cape Town iStore is similar to the Apple Stores I have visited, you can touch everything, they have 1 of each product just about, it has fairly helpful employees that let you get on with breaking the iPods (and that you can correct on the tiny details of the latest mac thing if you are enough of a geek), lots of glass and white surfaces and a keynote come lecture area.
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Vinod Ponmanadiyil said 9:46AM on 3-07-2008
I bought my iMac from Reliance iStore @ M.G Road - Bangalore, India. They are a bunch of cool guys and even offered me a couple of free tickets to the Boney-M concert.
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Santaji Shirke said 11:03AM on 3-07-2008
I can't wait for one to open in mumbai, the apple Authorised reseller i bought my MacBook Pro from is Crap!
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Paul D said 11:18AM on 3-07-2008
Sounds like it's time for Apple to improve their Indic language support.
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HandyMac said 11:34AM on 3-07-2008
Indeed. OS X has included (basic) fonts & entry systems for Hindi/Sanskrit, Gujarati and Gurmukhi since 10.3, added Tamil in 10.4, and Tibetan in 10.5. However, due to incompatibilities between Apple's AAT system and the OpenType system used in Windows/Linux, documents in these scripts cannot be exchanged cross-platform, nor can Mac users use any of the excellent fonts for these scripts available free for Windows/Linux. Here's hoping this will result in Apple finally paying real attention to the South Asian/Indic market, and fixing these problems.
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mentalsticks said 11:44AM on 3-07-2008
Isn't it weird that there's still no Bengali font installed, even in 10.5? (AFAIK, that is). According to some statistics, it's the world's fourth language... I guess there's not enough money to be made in Bangladesh+West Bengal. Still, it sucks.
HandyMac said 12:31PM on 3-07-2008
@mentalsticks: I don't know much about Bengali -- other than it surely looks elegant! -- (my interest is mainly in Buddhist material, thus Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, etc.) but I went to the Bangla version of Wikipedia:
http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/বাংলা_ভাষা
which seems to display okay using James Kaas' Code2000 font, a bargain at $5:
http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm.
Then I noticed the "Bangla script display and input help" page, which has info about Mac support:
http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/উইকিপেডিয়া:Bangla_script_display_help#Mac_OS_X
which took me to a site which appears to offer free fonts *and* keyboards for Bangla on OS X.
As a twenty-year Mac user, I can remember when the Macintosh was *the* international platform, before Mac OS's natural advantages in this area were forgotten and neglected in the 90s, thus allowing Windows to take over the field, and putting Mac users at a disadvantage in the case of complex scripts like Indic.
I don't think it's been a deliberate neglect so much as just that attention has been elsewhere -- and there hasn't been much demand coming from India, as from Japan and China, for instance, whose scripts Apple has always supported well. Now that a major Indian company is pushing Apple products, the necessary demand should appear, and push Apple into better support.
HandyMac said 12:33PM on 3-07-2008
Oh yeah, the site for Bangla fonts & keyboards:
http://ekushey.org/?page/osx
Haven't tried them yet, but they look good.
James C. said 12:06PM on 3-07-2008
And still the state of Maine, where every public school teacher and middle school student has a state issued MacBook, has no Apple store. A 2 hour drive for G-bar support, training, etc. On the upside, I bought my iPhones in New Hampshire and didn't pay sales tax.
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Manish Bansal said 12:08PM on 3-07-2008
I've been to the Apple store in Bangalore and also to the one in Minneapolis in US and I can tell you that there is no difference between them. The layout, the color scheme, the display, support staff, everything is the same. Sure, it doesn't have the lounge but you can easily mistake this store for an American one.
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Vinay Bhardwaj said 6:26PM on 3-07-2008
Been to the Apple Store at the Forum Mall in Bangalore. Looks just like My Apple Store in Freehold, NJ. Plenty of choice etc, good customer service, they replaced a defective ipod for me. Theres a picture of the store up on the Forum Mall Website in the gallery.
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iyou said 2:23AM on 3-08-2008
There's a nice little Apple store in the Atria mall in Worli, Mumbai. Friendly, helpful staff, and a decent selection of product. Compared with the Apple authorized service center in Mahim it's like you're on another planet :-)
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Quickdraw said 5:49PM on 3-09-2008
I think people at the Apple store here in Pune as well as the ones in Bombay and Bangalore are plain dumb. The products are overpriced and overhyped.
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Guru Panguji said 8:24AM on 3-10-2008
This is interesting. However, I have been in one of these Reliance Digital Stores, and I asked them about when the Penryn based MacBook was due to the store, all I got was a blank! They don't know what's Penryn, and they are oblivious about MacBook model numbers, when I tried that.
Part (well a major part) of the Apple store experience is that the people at the Apple store also really care about Apple and Mac products. However, I fear this is where probably the sales representatives and other helpers within these Reliance digital stores are going to lose out =(! *Sigh*!
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