Shortly after the May 2020 Portland riots, you will have noticed that although the Apple store was open for business, if you weren’t looking at the signs, you may have thought it had been turned in to a Soviet style prison camp.

With Portland residents dubbing the steel-clad building an “iFortress”, it’s easy to see where this nickname appeared from. Others have referred to it as a prison and “having vibes of the Kabul embassy”.

As you can see, the before and after of the building is quite astonishing. No doubt the company was very concerned about financial losses in terms of damage. Even though Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, large glass panels are not cheap if you need to replace them regularly. Even a cheap alluminum framed shopfront costs in excess of $3000 to install, so a free standing piece of 15 foot glass clearly costs considerably more and probably closer to 10x this price.

The Apple store is likely still not quite what Steve Jobs had envisioned. Although the steel fortress has been removed, Apple are still quite wary about what might happened. Instead of having towering glass panels, with two large glass doors. They have instead to divide each section in to more sensibly sized windows which are likely made of polycarbonate. This will obviously make the brand look older and less cutting edge, but at the same time, a repair bill for such a piece of glass will likely be 10x less than a larger panel.

Furthermore, this type of window cannot really be broken with regular vandalism and requires industrial strength tools. Although in fairness to the city, the building has not been touched since the fences were removed last month.

In any case, this is a great step in the right direction for Portland. Regardless of peoples own thoughts on what happened in 2020, vandalising stores was clearly not the answer. Hopefully the city will be able to put this episode behind it as things continue returning to normal.