Apple has seen the future, and it is about customer service.
On Thursday, Apple opened its largest U.S. store, a building in Boston with a glass and steel facade that a senior company executive said reflected Apple’s plan to expand retail its ventures at home and abroad.
Sandwiched between aging brick buildings on Boylston Street, the store features a ground floor with more than 100 Mac computers, a second level for iPod music players and iPhones and a third entirely for service. The store is Apple’s second-largest, after the one on Regent Street in London.
Ron Johnson, an Apple vice president and head of retailing, said the service center was designed to handle 1,000 customer inquiries a day. The Boston store also features a glass spiral staircase from the ground floor to the third.
Most other retailers would go broke offering this level of service, said J.P. Gownder, senior analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, because they normally sell many different brands.
“They’re selling so many disparate brands,” Gownder said of other electronics retailers. “They can’t really push any brand over any other brand.”
The Boston store also offers a glimpse into the latest retail thinking at the company, which is based in Cupertino, California, as it prepares to continue its international expansion with a new store in Beijing this summer.
The effort comes amid increased competition for Apple. Research In Motion said Monday that it was introducing a new high-end version of the BlackBerry, the Bold, or 9000. The company said it intended it for its core base of business users but also hoped that it would catch on in the broader retail market. The new model has twice the screen resolution of the current Curve BlackBerry model. It matches the resolution of the iPhone, whose screen is larger.
At the Apple store in Boston, “concierges”…