So we're hearing mostly good things about this past weekend's grand opening of the Apple retail store at The Streets At Southpoint in Durham, North Carolina, which is music to our ears. We were worried that after 27 stores and a three-month break, Mac fans might not be so juiced as to line up early just to get into Yet Another Retail Store; after all, they all pretty much look the same, you know. And even though the Southpoint location is the first in that geographical area, there's been so much exposure of the store's immutable interior that we were a little concerned that even the most fanatical Mac users might be too jaded to give up a Saturday morning snooze-in just to hang at the mall.

Happily, our fears proved unfounded; faithful viewer Phil pointed out an article in The Herald-Sun which quotes the Apple store's assistant manager as saying, "We had people waiting outside at 6 AM in the rain." Granted, that's not the "two freaks who drove 1300 miles in a flaming Yugo to get in line three weeks in advance" sort of story we were accustomed to hearing last year, but hey, given the circumstances, we consider waiting for four hours in the rain to be a pretty hardcore move. All told, "about 200 people were waiting in line" when the store opened its doors. To those 200 people: we salute you. You are a credit to your mania.

For what it's worth, the early birds enjoyed more benefits than just lack of sleep, soggy clothes, and the joy of being some of the first to cross the threshold into Apple's latest Retail Utopia; they also probably got to miss most of the traffic nightmares. In what must have been a spectacular display of poor planning, the new mall drew some 50,000 shoppers, all of whom had to duke it out for 6,400 parking spaces-- a scene that some described as "insanity" and "worse than Christmas," but which we like to think of as "the climactic scene in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior." See, kids? Sometimes obsession really does pay off!

Speaking of obsession, we can't help but notice that the "Coming Soon" section has once again vanished from Apple's retail page. From this we infer that Apple doesn't plan to have another store ready for a grand opening this coming weekend, which means the company is starting up slowly after its store-opening hiatus. That's probably wise; after three months of inactivity, we wouldn't want Apple to pull a groin muscle or anything. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) Maybe the week after...