I picked up my US card Apple Friends & Family (Employee portal) JP order in 2017 at a transport Yamato office down the street from my Tokyo hotel https://faq-en.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/...ales-office%3F My delivery location was actually the Yamato Delivery Office.

That just gave me an idea because I know someone whose partner is a retired apple exec, I’ll see if they can share access to this program

At Bic, they usually can process the purchase tax free right away (i.e. you pay the tax-free price + their fee)

But not apparently if you place a special order

Bringing back this thread to look for alternative places to buy Apple products vs the Apple Store. We will be in Japan in June and plan to get a couple of the new MacBook Airs but there are no Apple Stores in Sapporo, and I’ve found Bic Camera has a very limited supply of options, for example they rarely if ever carry 1TB disk drives in MacBook Air machines so finding a US keyboard with 24GB memory and a 1TB drive will be almost impossible from their regular stock.

Are there any big Apple retailers in or near Sapporo who fill the gap with the lack of an official Apple Store and where a tax free purchase is possible?

Looks like there is a Costco in Sapporo
https://www.costco.co.jp/store-finder/Sapporo
Costco usually has Macs.

But looking at the catalog
https://www.costco.co.jp/Computers-M...s/c/cos_26.1.1
It doesn't look like they have 1TB models.

I'll be in Sapporo later this month and will let you know if I find anything.

Thank you! But does Costco there offer a tax refund at point of sale?

Isn't Japan moving away from that model due to rampant fraud?

I think the question is, does Cosco offer tax refund at all.

Not now but they are considering a future model where the refunds occur at the airport not at point of sale

Revisiting with a question - if we decide to buy, it will likely be at Bic Camera or Yodabashi and more likely than not, given possibly lower inventory at the Sapporo locations, we will need to take a Japanese keyboard model.

Are there major differences that will be unacceptable for the Japanese vs US keyboard, or is it similar enough to get used to fairly quickly? Google searches suggest a wide variety of opinions - from it become impossible to accept, and others saying other than a couple shortcuts to memorize, it's a no-brainer

I guess the main annoyances fall into two categories

1. Different key sizes and layout
JIS keyboard has a smaller spacebar .shift keys etc. further right, additional key to change from English to Japanese input. Overcoming this requires new muscle memory and tolerance for occasional fat-finger errors that throw you into typing in Japanese. It's like driving an unfamiliar car ... Some people will immediately get the feel for it. Others will have a frustrating time.

2. Symbols assigned to different keys
The symbols that you use occasionally and need to look at the keyboard to locate, are not assigned to the same keys. JIS keyboard puts @ to the right of P but ANSI has it on the 2 key. If you have a ^ in an important password, you'd better take the time to learn where it is, or change that password.

Reminds me of the bilingual keyboards in Canadian laptops. The crazy thing is that French usage outside of Quebec is minimal and yet lots of laptops sold in English Canada have a bilingual keyboard. I don't even know any French.

Canada is an interesting case. I guess Canada opted for a modified version of the QWERTY keyboard to make switching between the two languages a bit smoother?

While this thread is about Apple Stores, I am curious if anyone has recently bought a new iPhone at Bic Camera, Yodabashi or similar and was able to trade in their old phone. It's not a deal-breaker because I can sell the phone privately later, but it would be helpful to get everything done in one transaction if possible. Apple Stores will do the trade-in, but not tax-free.

I'm hoping by December there won't be an issue getting stock of an Iphone 17 Pro Max 256GB in Blue.