Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple appears to be making a slight branding change to its retail business, dropping the “Store” moniker when referring to its Apple Store locations. Apple has already made the change online, and all of its store pages now refer to stores by names like “Apple Union Square” or “Apple Valley Fair” or “Apple The Grove,” instead of “Apple Store, Valley Fair” or “Apple Store, The Grove.”

It’s a change that appears to have started rolling out with the launch of the newer Apple Stores, like the Union Square location in San Francisco. Apple has always referred to that store as just Apple Union Square, and over the course of the last few days, the company has updated all of its retail store webpages to remove the “Store” branding. What was once “Apple Store, Fifth Avenue,” for example, is now just “Apple Fifth Avenue.”

This seems a logical path for Apple, adhering to their simplify-where-possible strategy and their adherence to minimalism. A bit like their move from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. This also addresses the internationalization issue. Apple will always be Apple, but the word store does not cross language barriers in the same way as the Apple brand by itself.

That said, I still think about going to the local Apple Store. It’ll take me some time to make the switch to heading over to Apple.