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“Apple’s Largest Products” “We actually don’t call them Apple Stores anymore,” explained Angela Ahrendts, the Cupertino device maker’s head of retail and former Burberry CEO. “We call them Town Squares, because they’re gathering places for five hundred million people who visit us every year.” Whatever you call them, Apple’s retail spaces are glass-and-maple metonyms for the company — “Apple’s largest products,” in Ahrendts’ words. When the first store opened in 2001, the press and the company’s competitors mocked the venture. But more than fifteen years later, the five hundred or so locations generate far more revenue per square foot than any other retailer — almost double the second-place, diamond-dealing Tiffany & Co. The flagship stores occupy prime real estate in the heart of the world’s major cities, and it’s here that the Town Square vision will take shape. In addition to the main retail floor — a tree-dotted “Genius Grove,” in the company’s new parlance — each of the big-city stores will have an outdoor Plaza and an indoor Forum. The Town Squares, Ahrendts said in September, are places to “relax, meet up with friends, or just listen to a local artist on the weekends.” Come hang out, says Apple; this isn’t about device shopping. In Paris, the company is renovating a nineteenth-century building on the Champs-Élysées; its five-story atrium will be the company’s largest Forum. A store slated for Milan will include a Forum underneath the city’s Piazza della Libertà in addition to a waterfall entrance. And in Washington, Apple is converting the iconic Carnegie Library in Mount Vernon Square into a flagship store. “We can’t think of a better place than a building originally created for the city to access knowledge,” Ahrendts says. The Carnegie retrofit will swap the original bookshelves with iPhone galleries, but the inscription on the building’s neoclassical facade — “Dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge” — will remain.