Apple closed seven of its French stores on Saturday, October 24, as the country braces for another round of demonstrations.
MacGeneration spotted the closures first. All three Paris stores are affected: Champs-Élysées, Opéra, and Marché Saint-Germain. Apple's website also lists Saturday closures for Bordeaux Sainte-Catherine, Lille, Strasbourg, and Aix-en-Provence.
The timing follows October 17, when hundreds of thousands of people were said to have protested peacefully, but violence and looting broke out in several cities. According to the Associated Press, many businesses across France were targeted. Apple's Lille and Bordeaux stores were among them.
The closures are likely a precaution to protect employees and stores. What the seven share is a street entrance. Apple's stores inside shopping malls are expected to operate normally, so the line falls along how a store is built, not along which city it sits in. Bordeaux and Lille appear on the list again, now alongside five stores that were not reported looted.
There is a second thread. Reports emerged of stolen iPhones showing a message that the devices had been disabled and were being tracked, with instructions to return them to the stores they came from. Le Signal shared a video that purportedly shows the message. It is unverified. Remote locking itself would not be new, since Apple has long let owners lock a lost or stolen iPhone through its Find My service, but a message telling thieves where to take the phone back is a different thing.
It also raises a practical question. Anyone following those instructions would be walking into the very stores that were hit, on a day when several of them are closed.