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On my way back south from visiting relatives over the festive season I dropped by the Meadowhall Centre to do some post-Christmas sales shopping, and of course to pay a visit to one of the few Apple Stores in the UK outside of London and Manchester.

Posted via Flickr by aallan

The Apple Store in the Meadowhall Centre in Sheffield

I've only been in two other Apple Stores before, the Pasadena store in California and the Ginza store in Tokyo, and they provided very different experiences. The five storey Apple cube in Tokyo came as a surprise following the small high street atmosphere in Pasadena, but I wasn't really expecting to be surprised again by the store in Sheffield.

But I was, it was tiny. With only half the square footage of the Pasadena store, the Sheffield store felt far more crowded than either of my pervious Apple experiences. It lalso ooks like not everyone was having a merry Apple Christmas as there was a pile of "refurbished" products sitting next to the Genius Bar in the store. Presumably these were all post-Christmas returns the store was trying to sell on?

Posted via Flickr by aallan

A pile of post-Christmas refurbished products...

I knew that Apple offered refurbished products on its online store, but this is the first time I'd seen anything of the sort in one of their bricks and mortar stores. In typical Apple style, the discounts were fairly small. However amongst the pile was a Mac mini with £50 off which I was on the verge of impulse buying, until my wife returned from elsewhere in the mall and put a stop to that sort of thing. Oh well, must be quicker next time...