Manhattan Village Store

Besides the variety of products at an Apple store, there is a maze of wiring and technical systems. In these photos of the half-finished Manhattan Village (S. Calif.) store, you can see some of Gigabit Ethernet network cabling and how it's all routed and managed.

The store appears to be very narrow--perhaps 22-feet wide. On the right you can see the wall cut-out for two LCD screens at the Genius Bar location. On the right wall are two blue Ethernet network cables. If you look at the top of boh white walls, you can see a cable raceway, with bundles of blue network cabling. At the right rear of the store is the doorway for the storeroom, office, etc.

There are two visible, blue network cables coming from the wall. At the top of the wall is the cable raceway, with network cabling looped at two points.

Another view of the right wall of the store showing the various cable and electrical outlets on the wall, and the overhead cable routing.

A close-up view of the overhead cable management, which will eventually be concealed by a suspended ceiling. The yellow object is a laser leveling device for the ceiling support installation.

If you look very closely at the boxes with the greenish labels, you'll notice that it's Berk-Tek LANmark 1000 (pdf), a CAT 6 Ethernet network cable capable of 1,000 Mbps speeds--very advanced for most computer users, but the current standard for Apple and heavy-duty Ethernet users. All the existing Apple stores have CAT 6 cabling that supports Gigabit Ethernet. Berk-Tek normally supplies boxes of 1,000 of cable. From the number of boxes, it appears that there could be at least 8,000 feet of cabling throughout the store. Other sources say Apple stores contain about 20,000 feet of various cabling.

Just to the left of the green and yellow tool cases is a cut in the concrete flooring for the floor-mounted electrical outlets.