December 9, 2011: Apple opens a store in New York’s fabled Grand Central Terminal, the company’s fifth Manhattan retail outlet.
Overlooking the terminal’s Main Concourse, the enormous Apple Grand Central makes a stunning addition to the 140-year-old train station, which is one of New York’s busiest transportation hubs.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is Apple’s flagship phone. But in popular YouTuber MKBHD’s yearly Smartphone Awards 2025, the iPhone 17 bagged the Phone of the Year award, beating its siblings and Android rivals.
The iPhone Air and iPhone 16e also won three more awards in different categories.
Despite its age and stiff competition from Android flagships, the iPhone 16 was the bestselling smartphone in the world in the third quarter of 2025. More impressively, a new report from Counterpoint Research indicates iPhones bagged the top four slots.
Even the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which launched toward the end of the quarter, made the list.
December 8, 1975: San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Paul Terrell opens the Byte Shop, one of the world’s first computer stores — and the first to sell an Apple computer.
Years before Apple would open its own retail outlets, the Byte Shop stocks the first 50 Apple-1 computers built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Apple is adding new language options for Fitness+, its subscription workout service. Hundreds of workouts and meditations will be digitally dubbed into Spanish and other languages. In addition, Fitness+ is expanding to 28 new markets around the world.
The expansion should broaden the appeal of a service voice that reportedly hasn’t found many customers so far.
December 7, 2007: Apple opens its magisterial store on West 14th Street in New York City. The new Apple Store features a three-story glass staircase deemed the most complex ever made.
The store is Apple’s biggest in Manhattan (and second-largest in the United States, after the one on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue). The first three-story Apple retail outlet, it boasts an entire floor dedicated to services. It’s also the first Apple Store to offer free Pro Labs classes to customers.
The sheer size of this Apple Store — with its 46-foot Genius Bar — proves impressive. However, its astonishing spiral staircase steals the show as its most iconic design feature.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: With the sudden departure of Apple’s UI design chief Alan Dye — and the prompt naming of a Steve Jobs-era veteran to take his place — are we looking at a software renaissance for iPhones and Macs?
We certainly hope so!
Also on The CultCast:
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The best people to ask about Steve Lemay, the new head of user interface design at Apple, are the people who’ve worked with him.
Spoiler alert: They seem absolutely thrilled. The word “excited” keeps coming up in their comments on the change in leadership.
Here’s what the people in a position to really know Lemay have to say about him.
December 6, 2000: Apple Computer’s stock price falls after the company posts its first quarterly loss since Steve Jobs’ return to Cupertino in 1997.
Shares tumble $3 to just $14 a share as doom-predicting pundits worry that the big Apple comeback might come screeching to a halt. Little did they know …
Alan Dye, the former chief of Apple’s user interface design, has done brilliant, groundbreaking work — but almost no one is getting to experience it.
Dye just got poached by Meta, and the majority opinion among Apple fans seems to be “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Some of Dye’s critics, like John “King of the Apple nerds” Gruber, are scathing. “His tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company,” Gruber wrote after Dye’s departure from Apple became public Wednesday.
Dye, of course, is not perfect. He is rightly getting criticized for Liquid Glass, the shiny new interface in Apple’s operating systems, that’s been tweaked, rolled back, tweaked again, and is now semi-optional for users who don’t want it.
Where’s the conviction Apple is famous for? Steve Jobs must be spinning.
But Dye’s best work is spectacular, important and deep. You’ve just not seen it.