Apple Australia announced this morning that it will open its latest Retail Store in Cheltenham, Victoria later this week as well as overnight unveiling a new, cheaper iMac for educational institutes.
The store, to be situated in Westfield’s Southland complex, will be opened at 10am AEST to the general public this coming Saturday, with the media invited to tour the store earlier in the morning. Once open, the new store will increase the number of local Apple Retail Stores to 12, with more on the cards including the rumoured restoration of Queensland’s historic Macarthur Chambers building.
Last month the company opened its newest store in New South Wales, which itself is becoming swamped with the Apple stores, now boasting more than half of all of the Apple stores in Australia.
The American-based company also announced overnight a new, cheaper iMac made specifically for higher education organisations, with an Australian price tag of $1,179. However it’s not the cheapest iMac available to Australian education institutes — there’s one just over $100 less for $1,049, but it’s slower and hasn’t been updated in a while.
The slightly slower all-in-one iMac features a 3.1GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i3 processor, 250GB hard drive, 21.5″ display, AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor and 2GB of RAM.
Apple opted to leave out support for its latest technology, Thunderbolt, which was developed by Intel and allows users to connect high-speed peripherals and displays from the one port. The iMac ships with Apple’s new Mac OS X Lion, and is available for educational institutes from today via Apple’s Australian website.
Image credit: Apple
They keep opening them in the suburbs – (Chadstone, Doncaster, Cheltenham) – but the CBD store is still a great big whole in the ground.
#facepalm
*hole, even…
Their strategy is largely obvious: target the places where people go the most (I read recently that Doncaster, Chadstone and Southland are among the 5 largest malls in Australia on a raw turnover basis), first. Interesting, though, that these three sites are just 15 minutes apart – they are definitely doing the saturation bombing approach. Plummeting rates for shopping-centre real estate – Southland’s store turnover has been truly staggering recently – wouldn’t hurt their business case either.
The eventual city store will be an anchor property for sure, but higher rentals and lower foot traffic probably make it a luxury on which Apple can afford to wait for a bit longer. At least until the pit of construction works along Bourke Street and environs is made passable again.
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