Apple/Mac Store Opening On 5th Avenue

Megan and I attended the new Mac store opening on 59th and 5th Avenue yesterday. Actually, "attended the opening" sounds a lot more glamorous than the truth, which is, we stood in line for over three hours freezing our buns off to get a free t-shirt and a possible glimpse of Steve Jobs, like a couple of tech geeks with Beatlemania tendancies.

The line snaked around nearly eight blocks in total, and originally I was stoked because the first 2500 people were supposed to get a free t-shirt. When we showed up and realized that there were way more than 2500 people ahead of us in line, we still clung onto the hope that these cheap bastards were going to give us SOME reward for waiting in line for so long - I mean, you KNOW they made lots of money that first day.

After the first hour or so of waiting, Megan went to go get relief supplies, in the form of a couple of pints of Fosters, which we white-bagged (to go along with the Apple theme) and slurped through straws like the lushes that we are. I wasn't about to wait another two hours sober. We discussed important things like Howie Mandell's return to fame in Deal or No Deal, a strange man who came up to Megan and very menacingly asked what the line was for, and how surreal the experience was that we were standing in line for three hours to GIVE THEM MONEY.

Every five to ten minutes you would here shouts and cheering, and we at first thought that Jobs had shown up in all his geeky glory. It turns out it was the store personnel, sporting the t-shirts I had come to desire like the Holy Grail, who were cheering customers as they entered and left the store. I noticed the cheers were louder for those who bought something.

By the time we got into the store, I felt like a cross between Dorothy entering the Emerald City and Tony Soprano ready to kick some ass. I was excited, but I was tired and realized that I was probably not going to get my t-shirt. The staff gave us high-fives as we pranced our way into cyber-nirvana.

To say that it was an amazing piece of architectural and PR wonder is an understatement. As you can see from the picture above, the building itself is this glass cube with the glorious Apple glowing like the Mothership. You have the option of taking a glass elevator with a swivel door (dude, it was so cool) or the winding staircase. Throughout the wait in line, we made reference to Willie Wonka's great glass elevator. If I could have had Johnny Depp show up, that would have made up for the fact that we missed the t-shirts.



We got to play with the new MacBook in BLACK:




and when I say that is a sexy piece of machinery, I mean SEXY. I almost started humping the computer right there.



I was determined to walk out of there with something, so I bought a new Mighty Mouse, which I needed anyway...