There's been so much hair-pulling over the whole "LCD vs. CRT iMac" and "GHz or not" issues, one topic that's a dead cert for Wednesday's Stevenote has been almost totally ignored: the Apple retail stores. Of course, in terms of being a hot topic and stirring up controversy, the retail initiative had its day; it's more of a "May 2001" thing, after all, and now that the cat's out of the bag, it's only natural that conspiracy-minded Apple watchers would have moved on. But the fact remains that Steve promised us twenty-five stores open by the end of the year, he revealed the locations of fourteen, and he opened two. Two months later, we've still got... two. That means there's a whole lot more retaily goodness coming our way, and what better time to fill us in on Apple's progress in Gapifying its business than at the Mac-loving consumer mecca known as Macworld Expo?

Faithful viewer Jeff Norberry hooked us up with an eWEEK article that provides a nice recap of what we know so far, and what we can expect in the future. You may recall that Uncle Steve proclaimed that a new Apple store would open "every ten days" starting 8-10 weeks from the original announcement, and oh, looky-- it just so happens that we're coming up on the nine-week mark right now. If that timing strikes you as a fascinating coincidence, you need to get out more. We had always assumed that Steve planned to open the next wave of stores starting at the Expo; indeed, that's one of the things to which we've been looking forward the most. (As denizens of the Beantown area, we're geographically challenged when it comes to shopping in L.A. or Virginia, and as such, we're still virgins as far as visiting an Apple store is concerned.)

Ever since we heard that Apple was preparing a massive store in SoHo, we naturally assumed that Steve would announce its grand opening this week to coincide with the big show. We figured that, some night after the Javits Center closed, we'd be able to mosey on down to the Apple store and finally be able to see what all the fuss is about-- you know, test-drive display Macs that actually work, choose a game from an actual selection of Mac software, and maybe ask a few questions of a staff member who a) will actually know the answers, and b) might conceivably talk to us without having a loaded gun pointed at his or her head. In other words, all that stuff we Mac users never thought we'd see in retail until the Second Coming or whatever.

There's only one problem: according to eWEEK, the next stores are slated to open in "early August"-- and if our six years of study in Date-Reading Arts at Calendar University taught us anything, it's that August comes after July. (Try to keep up, here.) What's more, the SoHo store is reportedly "nowhere near completion," so it looks like our dream of experiencing retail magic is temporarily on hold. Wait a minute, so we have to figure out something else to do at night in Manhattan? Not that we're complaining, though; if eWEEK is correct, we're no more than six weeks away from grand openings at the Apple stores in our neck of the woods-- namely, Cambridge and Peabody, Massachusetts-- so we'll get to see the Promised Land soon enough.