Apple plans to reopen some Apple Store locations in the first half of April
Apple expects to reopen its brick-and-mortar retail outlets in the first half of April, retail and people chief Deirdre O'Brien told staffers on Tuesday.

Apple may begin reopening retail locations in April, though it won't reopen them all at once.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple shuttered all of its Apple Store locations outside of China. Though originally slated to reopen March 27, Apple updated that timeline to "until further notice."
Now, it appears that notice is being given. According to an internal memo sent Apple Store employees and seen by VentureBeat, the Cupertino tech giant is expecting to reopen its Apple locations in early April.
In the U.S. specifically, Apple appears to be planning on reopening retail locations on a staggered basis instead of all at once.
The new retail plans come on the same day that President Donald Trump said he hopes to reopen the country's business operations by Easter, which takes place on April 12 this year, The Wall Street Journal reported.
While Apple also began urging its Apple Park to work from home in early March, it eventually implemented flexible and remote work arrangements to all of its offices outside of Greater China.
In the internal memo, O'Brien said that Apple will extend its work-from-home policies until April 5 at the earliest, and will re-evaluate those arrangements on a weekly basis depending on a staffer's location. Along with heading Apple's retail operations, O'Brien is also the company's chief of people, so it's likely that the guidance refers to office employees as well.
Of course, the San Francisco Bay Area, where Apple Park is located, and the entire state of California are still under government shelter-in-place and stay-at-home mandates. Aside from essential IT and infrastructure personnel, those mandates will override Apple's own policies in affected areas.
That timeline is much quicker than many public health experts are recommending. And while the COVID-19 pandemic is an extremely fluid situation, it's likely that the outbreak will be ongoing through April. Because of that, Apple is likely to maintain its deep cleaning and anti-spread measures at its retail locations.

Apple may begin reopening retail locations in April, though it won't reopen them all at once.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple shuttered all of its Apple Store locations outside of China. Though originally slated to reopen March 27, Apple updated that timeline to "until further notice."
Now, it appears that notice is being given. According to an internal memo sent Apple Store employees and seen by VentureBeat, the Cupertino tech giant is expecting to reopen its Apple locations in early April.
In the U.S. specifically, Apple appears to be planning on reopening retail locations on a staggered basis instead of all at once.
The new retail plans come on the same day that President Donald Trump said he hopes to reopen the country's business operations by Easter, which takes place on April 12 this year, The Wall Street Journal reported.
While Apple also began urging its Apple Park to work from home in early March, it eventually implemented flexible and remote work arrangements to all of its offices outside of Greater China.
In the internal memo, O'Brien said that Apple will extend its work-from-home policies until April 5 at the earliest, and will re-evaluate those arrangements on a weekly basis depending on a staffer's location. Along with heading Apple's retail operations, O'Brien is also the company's chief of people, so it's likely that the guidance refers to office employees as well.
Of course, the San Francisco Bay Area, where Apple Park is located, and the entire state of California are still under government shelter-in-place and stay-at-home mandates. Aside from essential IT and infrastructure personnel, those mandates will override Apple's own policies in affected areas.
That timeline is much quicker than many public health experts are recommending. And while the COVID-19 pandemic is an extremely fluid situation, it's likely that the outbreak will be ongoing through April. Because of that, Apple is likely to maintain its deep cleaning and anti-spread measures at its retail locations.
Comments
So, who again is insane? Totally worth it to lose your life (or infect me, or my wife, or teenage daughters) for the freedom to wander into a store to purchase an Apple Pencil or Watch. /s
Please refer to the statement above "Of course, the San Francisco Bay Area, where Apple Park is located, and the entire state of California are still under government shelter-in-place and stay-at-home mandates. Aside from essential IT and infrastructure personnel, those mandates will override Apple's own policies in affected areas."
Apple has and always will follow the guidance and authority of local/state/national officials. They will do the right thing for their employees, customers, and the people in the communities in which they operate. There is nothing wrong with Apple starting to put smart plans in place to return its stores to operation - in some form and at some capacity. We do not yet know what any of this will look like at this point in time. However, nobody can afford to sit around between now and some arbitrary point in the future before deciding what the next steps might be. Setting calendar checkpoints is perfectly acceptable, but only as long as they are willing to reevaluate the next steps based on the data at those points in time. Not only that, planners better have a hierarchy of conditionally qualified plans queued up to react to the actual conditions at the checkpoints, not just some unconditional or heavy-handed plan. The actual situation two weeks from now may be radically different, good or bad, but most likely the latter. The elapsed time that it took in China to get over the peak, albeit with authoritarian levels of enforcement, is probably a decent clue. It certainly wasn't 15 days.
What's happening today on a scientific and social level is very similar in character, but thankfully not in scale, to the 2018 Flu Pandemic. The following site is very instructional: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22148/ . I think we have progressed significantly as a global society since 1918 and are fortunate to now have a predominantly independent media versus the total puppet/propaganda media that was widely in-place during WW1 (except in Spain who got blamed for the virus because they didn't have the propaganda machinery in place like everyone else did). But the scenarios playing out today in real time are eerily similar to 1918 in terms of trying to deal with health, moral, social, national, local, and economic concerns and trying to impose will over scientific data and observations. One cold hard reality of 1918 that should cause significant concern is that the mortality rate of the second wave of the virus was much, much worse than the first wave. No matter what happens today, we have to be careful not to stay in the quick-fix mindset or pretend that it's over before we have a proven vaccine in place.
In a general sense, you haven't bothered to state anything about types of retailer, types of businesses, or what changes would need to take place for businesses to reopen safely, only that if a business isn't open in" the first half of April" it's insane. You really haven't thought any of this through, but I hope you can answer at least some of my queries to help guide you back to some medium of sanity… at least for your own sake.
Let's define sensible. Young AND old folks are going to need serious medical help (respirators, etc) to survive. If the medical system gets overwhelmed, like happened in Italy (over 6,100 dead and 64,000 confirmed cases in Italy as of yesterday, or a die-off of over 9.5%), then we could be approaching a major die-off, and not just of older folks. In the US, with a population of 330 M and assuming everyone gets the virus, even a 1% die-off is 3.3 million dead. In a world with 7.7 billion people, assuming everyone gets it, 1% would be 77 million dead. But that's understating the problem: If the world's medical systems gets overwhelmed, we’ll see more like a 3-5% die-off. Think about that. 1 out of every 20 people on the planet could theoretically die of this virus.
To put this in context, from wikipedia: “World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion).“
Now, because of the woeful lack of testing, we in the US only see the number of confirmed cases, which is a fraction of the true infection rate. So folks shouldn't look at the dying now and equate them with the unknown number of sick now. However, there's more to determining the die-off rate than just determining the number of sick now. The proper comparison is with the number of sick 2 or more weeks ago. Only when we get enough tests to get a proper snapshot of not just now but two weeks back will we be able to calculate the potential die-off.
And even then, we’ll find the percentage is going to be heavily dependent on the amount of adequate medical care that is available. And unfortunately, the vast majority of Earth's people don't have access to anything close to adequate medical care. Ergo, we are just at the beginning of something truly and horrifyingly tragic. Therefore, each of us is morally bound to do our bit to keep the transmission rate down, if for no other reason than when, not if, it comes for us, we will have increased the chance that there's adequate medical help available for ourselves or our loved ones.
Like it or not, ignore it or not, we're all in this together.
PS: If Apple actually makes a statement—unlike this article which isn't isn't an official statement with solid dates— that "things are worse than we expected so we won't be opening up stores again until the second half of April," will you then be calling Apple and Tim Cook insane? How about mid-April, since that could be from the 11th to the 20th?