Personal Dork Assistant

At the Apple Store UTC, 6:45PM

Found out that Friday Night Magic started at 5:30 when I called at 5:26, so here I am instead. There's a line, maybe a hundred folks ahead of me, which isn't totally insane compared to other openings, but then there's another 75 minutes until open.

7:50
Killed time by beating some more Warioware mini-games. The employees marched along the line of people raising enthusiathm by shouting "Panther! Panther!" as one of them filmed with a DV camera. Even a cool retail job is still a retail job. The line was stretching out behind me across the food court, at least three times the length of the line ahead of me, so it was worth standing in line.

8:00
The door finally opened to cheers, mostly from the staff, but still. Didn't quite squeeze into the store with the first wave, but then they decided that they can cram a few more sardines into the can and let a few more of us in. We got Panther dog-tags as we walked in. Dog-tags? Cheaper than T-shirts, I guess. They did have a 10%-off sale on everything with Panther purchase. Eyed the 40 GB iPod for a second, but only a second. Did grab an iSight. Or rather, I got in (a long and growing every second) the checkout line and asked one of the (many) store staffers to grab an iSight for me. iChat AV might be the Killer App to tempt dad to upgrade his Smurf G3, so we're going to need at least one camera anyway.

8:45
Took forever to check out and finally found out why it was taking so long. The checkout girls were asking a million questions about registration, etc., when there were a million people waiting in line inside and outside the store. Even when I declined she had to fiddle with the iMac (possibly the world's most expensive POS terminal) to enter something or another. They probably drummed the spiel into her during training and it's fine for regular conditions, but hurry it up for tonight already. Looked into OS X alternatives to dad's favorite games. Now, if you're going to put "Mah Jong" on the box, make your damn game plays a real game of MahJong and not some bastardized tile-matching game. Fuckers.

Got the free grand-opening T-shirt on the way out. It's a nice Hanes Beefy-T, but the XL size is just a little bit too big. I guess I can hit the weights to fill out the shoulders a bit. Not much I can do about the length, though. The line was still stretching across the food court when I left, maybe another 2-300 people. So conservatively the store had at least 500+ customers the first night, each of whom probably bought at least a copy of Panther, and not a few of them had bigger boxes, too. We'll see if they keep it up, or not.

Got Panther installed and burned a copy for Sam. The new OS is definitely snappier, although it would've been nice to have that without paying for two upgrades in the process. There's no technical barriers to copying the CDs, unlike Windows. But I'm not feeling too guilty about it as we'll probably be dropping some $K's on a new computer soon. I think AAPL would take that tradeoff any day. There's something to be said for vertical integration.