A photo tour of Arizona Apple Stores (or "What to do when you have too much free time.")

Well, for no particular reason, I decided to visit all five of the Arizona Apple Stores this weekend. Since the Tucson store was the farthest, and we drove there anyway this weekend, I started there:
It's located in the La Encantada shopping mall. It's a pretty mall, like a cross between Biltmore and Kierland. Walking around in the 100+ degree heat and high humidity, we both wondered why they don't enclose more malls in AZ.

Next, we hit the two southern Valley Apple Stores. First was the one in the Chandler Fashion Center:
It's located in the basement of the mall, so the "hot" new 3G iPhone only gets EDGE reception, thus they can't demo the new higher speed data rate. Brilliant.

Barely ten miles east in San Tan Marketplace is the Gilbert store:
Why they need two stores so close is a mystery. It's a brand new mall and the Gilbert area really needed the new retail options. It's a sprawling complex, similar to the new one near us at Happy Valley and the 17.

We hit the first Apple Store in the Valley next in the Biltmore:
The Biltmore mall puzzles us. Unless they've changed, nearly every store closes at 4pm on Saturday and Sunday. We went there the week before Christmas a couple years ago at 4:15pm and like 4 stores were open. The Apple store was open to 6pm I think.

Lastly, we stopped by the newest Valley store in Glendale today. It opened yesterday:
This is another store in a mall basement with no 3G signal. Granted this only affects one product in their range, but still.

All the stores are running together for me at this point. I'm not really sure what possessed me to go to all of them. Just weird, I guess. Hopefully within a few months I'll be able to visit one and pick up a nice new iPhone. Or a new iPod, to replace my long-gone Nano. We'll see.