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Apple Brings Its Online Retail Experience To Saudi Arabia
The Cupertino company has launched its official online store and app in Saudi Arabia, offering Arabic-language support and personalized shopping for the first time.
Apple has officially entered the Saudi retail market with the launch of its Apple Store online and the Apple Store app, now fully available in Arabic. The move marks the tech giant’s first direct-to-customer retail presence in the Kingdom — a shift that gives users access to Apple’s full product lineup and support ecosystem in their native language.
“We are thrilled to bring the Apple Store online and the Apple Store app to Saudi Arabia, offering customers a new way to explore and shop Apple’s extraordinary lineup of products and services,” said Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail and People. “Our teams can’t wait to connect with customers and help them discover how Apple innovations can meaningfully enrich their daily lives”.
Through the Apple Store app, users can browse with personalized recommendations based on their current devices, compare models, manage saved items, and track orders. The rollout also introduces full Arabic-language engraving for the first time, allowing customers to personalize AirPods, Apple Pencil, AirTag, and more with both Arabic and English text, emojis, or numbers.
Customers can now configure their Mac with custom chip, memory, and storage options or mix and match Apple Watch bands and cases for a personalized look. Support is also being expanded through chat and phone assistance, with services like Personal Setup, iOS migration, and cellular activation included post-purchase.
The store also offers Buy Now Pay Later options via Tamara, enabling customers to split payments over four months with zero interest. The Trade In program also arrives in the Kingdom, giving users the chance to exchange old devices for credit — or recycle them free of charge if no credit is available.
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Students and educators gain access to Apple’s Education Store, with discounted pricing on Macs and iPads. A limited-time back-to-school offer is also live until October 21, bundling AirPods or another accessory with eligible purchases.
Apple has confirmed it will begin opening physical stores in Saudi Arabia from 2026, with an iconic flagship planned for Diriyah, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The move builds on existing ties in the Kingdom, including the Apple Developer Academy launched in Riyadh in 2021 in partnership with local institutions.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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