By Chris Chang, posted Sep 21, 2011 at 3:01 AM, 7,427 views,

First Look Inside The New and Biggest Shanghai Apple Store!

The new Shanghai Apple store is a monster. It is big, huge and massive. It’s the biggest Apple store in China. It’s a five-story retail store and the Genius Bar dominated one of the levels. The store contains up to 300 Apple employees. So, here we have plenty of photos to see exactly what Apple has in store for its 40,000+ Chinese customers each day.

Gallery: Inside Apple’s Shanghai Nanjing East Store

The new Shanghai Apple store is located near the most popular tourist attraction in Shanghai, Huangpu River. The exact location is inside the new Henderson Metropolitan building on Nanjing East Road, a section of the city’s main shopping street. The store dominated the lower five levels of the 22-story building, and that’s really impressive for a retail store selling gadgets.

Last week, the red curtain covering the store was lifted, revealing a glowing Apple logo and a promise that Apple was going to light up Nanjing Road soon. Today, the store is opened to the press media. Everyone is so excited about it.

What’s inside the store? Well, the moment you stepped into the store, you will see a lot of iPad 2s and iPhone 4s on the ground floor. This ground floor will also be particularly important as it will be used for the super cool product launches, the line ups etc.

Nice.

And here’s a piece of good news. The 3G iPad 2 is finally available in China, and you can get it right here!

You may wonder, what’s so great with 3G iPad 2? Well, the iPad 2 is only available in Wi-Fi version for mainland China previously. For those Chinese consumers who would like to get the 3G version, they need to visit Hong Kong (only HK has officially had access to the 3G iPad 2). So, starting from today, the Chinese consumers no longer need to travel to Hong Kong to purchase the 3G version, it’s finally available for purchase in China Apple stores!

You can look for the Apple specialist if you need any help. Retail 2.0 is really cool!

Sadly, there’s no sight of iPhone 5…

There are 160-180 Macs set up for display in the store. Awesome.

The iconic spiral glass staircase!

This is the level of Genius Bar. The customer satisfaction will be a core focus at this store. You may not know, the genius bar wait times in China Apple stores are the longest in the world. So, Apple prepared one level of Genius Bar to take care the Chinese consumers.

They look very friendly!

Lots of accessories for you to choose!

Guess what, there’s a guide book explaining the new store. It explains the grand opening of the store, and the features of each level. The lower two floors are sales and support, the third floor is a “briefing room” for Apple’s super important business clients, and the top two floors are administrative offices for Apple corporate.

The store was originally due to open late August, but due to some building related issues as well as some heating/cooling and ventilation problems, the opening was postponed. You may ask, did Apple fix the problems? Well, sort of. They have imported stones from Italy to integrate into the store’s structure. Since the stones can absorb heat quite well, the heat problems may be solved. Anyway, we really look forward to the grand opening of this new Shanghai Apple store on September 23rd. It’s the fifth Apple retail store in China, and Shanghai’s third Apple store.

One More Thing

We’ve got a first exclusive look at the free gift that will be distributed to customers during the grand opening. It’s a tee shirt!

The words on the shirt are written in Shanghai language, that means “Hello, Nanjing East Road”.

We love it. And does anyone of you here has it? We want more.

Source: Sina Tech

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TAGS: Culture:China, Apple, Apple Store, Culture:China, nanjing east road, new Apple stores, photos, Shanghai, Shanghai Apple, Shanghai Apple's Store, store