The time: 7:00 am, the day after Thanksgiving. The place: Walden galleria, Buffalo NY. The event: The grand opening of the Apple retail store. Parking was easy to come by, despite the fact that this is usually the busiest shopping day of the Christmas season. I avoided the Wal-mart and Target in order to be a part of the Apple opening.

There was already a line when I got there at 7:15. I would guess about 30 people were in place. The employees were greeting everyone, showing off the new iPod, iTunes running on iBooks, and shooting film for the web site. By 7:30 the line had grown considerably, wrapping around the corner of the store and back towards the Bon-Ton.

The outside of the store was impressive. Lots of big displays in the windows, featuring the iPod, OSX, iBook. The crowd was getting restless as 8:00 approached. Several onlookers stopped to ask what was going on, and the reactions varied from "Apple? Cool" to "Apple? Huh?". Nonetheless, we waited anxiously as the hour approached. Finally at 8 am the outside spotlights dimmed and a fanfare sounded. As the doors opened, the B52's "Love Shack" was blasting loudly, and the employees formed a receiving line for those of us entering the store...

Enough, enough my Newton said. Let's get down to business. And so we went around and took some shots of the new Mecca.

First stop - the new iMacs. Newt was envious of the display and OSX. I'm not ready to replace my iMac DV yet, but OSX might be in my future.The next stop was over to the iBooks. These are the coolest portables I've seen.

Next we went to see what PDAs were being offered. The usual fare of Palm-based devices were available, including some Handspring units. I still think the Newt looks better in the display than any of the others.

By this time some of the employees and customers were looking at me strangely. They certainly didn't mind the picture taking, and I was asked a couple times if that was a new Apple PDA. No, sorry, it's not for sale...

Then my Newt spotted it - the iPod. I didn't expect the reaction it got. In fact, I switched to digital X-ray film to record its true feelings.

We looked around for a little while longer. Bought a copy of "You Don't Know Jack" (what a great party game). Checked out a new CD-RW for the iMac, and then split. The checkout girl had Apple logo fingernails (sorry, no picture).

After we checked out, they handed out T-shirts to the first 1000 customers (I think I was #13.) Anyway, my Newt decided to try the shirt on for size. Nope, too big.

All in all, not a bad store. I wish the store and its employees well!