With more than 300 stores around the world, it's easy to overlook the fact that one of the most popular specialty retail chains started out in a secret warehouse with an initial layout that resembled Best Buy's department design instead of the solution zone-focused areas the stores became known for.
During the prototype process, Jobs and company eventually realized the ideal arrangement would be to break up areas based on consumer interactions: an area for checking out how a camera and printer worked with a computer, another space for multimedia-focused tasks, and so on, with an emphasis on hands-on demos, so consumers could handle the goods themselves.
The 5th Avenue store in New York, which opened in 2006, probably best exemplifies Jobs's taste. The CEO designed the glass staircases and received a design credit for the unique transparent ground-level cube entrance, which distinguishes the store from its surroundings and screams "Apple."
