Biography | Steve Jobs — He Opened the First Apple Store in This Mall

On 19 May 2001 the first Apple Store opened at Tysons Corner Center in McLean, Virginia.

A second store opened the same day at the Glendale Galleria outside Los Angeles.

More than 500 people were in line at Tysons by 10 a.m.

Some had arrived before dawn.

Steve Jobs had walked reporters through the Virginia store a few days earlier, when it was still empty of customers.

He presented the rooms as a way to show what a Mac could do, not only how fast it was.

The plan that year was 25 U.S. stores.

This one sat between L.L. Bean and Ann Taylor in a former Liz Claiborne bay.

Sources put the floor plate between about 6,000 and 12,000 square feet.

Inside were kidney-shaped white tables, a corner Genius Bar with a red rotary phone, a theater with a projection screen, and shelves of boxed third-party software.

Every Mac was on the internet.

The two stores together saw more than 7,700 visitors and about $600,000 in sales that first weekend.

The original Tysons bay is not the store a visitor finds now.

Apple moved to a larger space in the same mall in 2014.

The pin is the mall, not a vanished doorway.

Glendale opened three hours later the same Saturday.

Cover: the Tysons store on opening day, as captioned by the photographer.

Photo: Blake Patterson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.