It's back! It's back! Just when we thought it was gone for good, Apple has answered our prayers (or, at least, our thrice-daily bordering-on-harassment nagging email requests) and restored the "Coming Soon" section to its retail page! Imagine our beaming, foaming delight when faithful viewer Justin Resuello hit us with the good news. Finally, Mac fanatics can drop all pretense of having real lives in favor of once again obsessing endlessly about where and when future Apple stores will spawn next! And just in time, too; now that Adobe has gone on the record as saying that Photoshop for Mac OS X will ship in April, some of us have really been looking for something else on which to fixate.

First up in Apple's second wave of retail store openings: as expected, the Durham, North Carolina location clumsily referred to by Apple as the "Apple Store The Streets at Southpoint." (Yick.) According to Apple, the Durham grand opening is slated for Saturday, March 9th (that's not this weekend, but the next), so those of you in the area may want to cancel the Panic Day parties, clear your schedules, and start planning your tactical approach now, with the help of Apple's handy maps. Those of you not in the area, well, Apple makes a point of mentioning that the new store is a mere twenty minutes from Raleigh/Durham International Airport. Time to cash in those frequent flyer miles.

Now, some people out there are going to say that even "those crazy Apple nuts" couldn't muster up enough enthusiasm to line up at insane hours and get all excited about Apple's 28th grand opening-- but we say there have just got to be some fevered North Carolinians looking to prove them wrong. As everyone knows, Apple's retail initiative isn't exactly profitable on paper yet, so the company can really use all the publicity it can get to help spread the word about each new store. A discreet call to the local paper mentioning that there's going to be a group of shirtless nutcases with their upper bodies painted aqua lined up at 4 AM just because an Apple store is about to open might go a long way on a slow news day, if you catch our drift. Try to show a little energy, and remember-- if these stores wind up folding, we're all headed back to CompUSA. Please muffle those screams.

Incidentally, this may have been going on for a while (or, given our general state of terminal cluelessness, a really long time), but we only just noticed that the Apple retail stores are now featuring "a free Getting Started Workshop for new Mac owners" every Saturday at 9 AM. In light of how many sales Apple is making to newbies and former Wintel users, apart from the time slot (as far as we're concerned, 9 AM on Saturdays is a time held sacred for sleep or cartoons; anything else constitutes a form of blasphemy), we consider that to be a fabulous idea. There you have it, folks: just one more reason why the proliferation of Apple stores is so crucial to the platform's growth and ultimate success. So get your Grand Opening mojo workin' and show a little spirit.