The opening was scheduled for 10 AM on a Saturday. The weather outside was beautiful...50 degrees, crisp and cool, classic New England Fall weekend. This was the kind of weekend where we would be out hiking in the Blue Hills or romping around in Vermont... but hey, there was a new Apple Store about to be unveiled to the public!

RainyDayMagazine got there around 9:30.  The line had formed long before then and was now stretching down half the length of the mall, and this was a BIG mall.  It was great to see that the first person in line was not some 46 year old Apple geek, but a 12 year old kid with a digital camcorder...ah, the next generation of Apple evangelists :-)

The store opened at 10 and the line moved for about 20 seconds.  We waited for another 20 minutes before we got close enough to see the store front.

There were the usual Apple Store groupies, but there were also a lot of "first timers".  We met some very pleasant folks who came up from the South Shore (where our Contributing Editor is from, so of COURSE they're pleasant) just to attend the store opening.

Everyone was greeted enthusiastically by the Apple folks... it was impossible not to fall into Steve Job's "reality distortion" field :-)

The store was busy, but the layout made movement around the displays easy and fluid.  We saw many gear and gadgets that had already been reviewed on RainyDayMagazine: SoundSticks and Ensembles from JBL, mm50 from Logitech, Maxtor drives, and Wacom tablets.

We also saw some cool new software (PhotoBooth) bundled with the new iMacs...the one with the built-in iSight camera.

Clearly some folks came ready to buy!  The checkout line was humming the entire time we were there.

Being Apple users since the introduction of the 128K Mac, we at RainyDayMagazine can't help but smile at a comment that used to be attributed to Microsoft and the WinTel platform... "Resistance is Futile"!

Apple opened a new store at the Burlington Mall in MA today.  In keeping with Apple's tradition, they were giving away t-shirts to the first 1000 visitors.

We drove up from Boston to see if the opening of a store deep in the heart of suburbia was any different than that of Cambridge or New York City.