The Brad Hole

We got there around 7:20 and a considerable line had formed, stretching down several storefronts past the Apple Store. After a few minutes in line, a kid behind us started counting folks, and the tally at that time was 92. While Beth was away peeing, some guy in line was handing out MacSlash stickers. It's like slashdot, only there a score of "2" is considered high. :-)

At one point while standing in line, a passerby shouted "Macs suck!" but fortunately no geek violence resulted. We still had some store credit for Williams-Sonoma from our wedding last year, so since we were standing directly in front of it, I went inside to buy some Pumpkin Spice Pancake/Waffle mix. Oh man, I love everything pumpkin. They were giving out pumpkin spice bread samples inside the store as well, so I brought some back for Beth, who doesn't like pumpkin but likes spice. I don't know that I saw any other Apple geeks making tracks for that, which surprised me because, hey, free food.

By the time 8pm rolled around, the line had just about doubled, so roughly 200 people were waiting to get in. We spied one guy with a laptop sporting Lord of the Rings desktops on what appeared to be a 10 second rotation. I think Beth was a little scared by that, and frankly so was I. ;-) Luckily, no one was dressed like a Klingon. As a side note, I've decided from here on out that I'm going to wear an inappropriate shirt for special events like this. Not the opposite, mind you, just the wrong one. While Beth was styling in her Aspyr t-shirt, I opted to skip my unfortunately-vast collection of Mac-related shirts that I wear all too often for special trips to Wendy's and go with one of those cheap Tucson Beer Fest shirts I picked up a while back. When I told Beth of this plan, she threatened to "out" me. Witchy woman.

So we made it inside on the first wave and got our dog tags. (Note to Apple: WTF?) It was at this point that they announced the 10% off bonus on any purchase made with Panther, and this is when we had to make some hard decisions. You see, we didn't need Panther - I get it free as an ADC Select member. We decided that since Beth is a student, we'd go for the $69 student discount price to get the 10% discount and perhaps add some other purchases to the mix.

After filling out a form each for a free iMac, we started gathering stones together: a copy of Panther, a copy of Another War[1], an iCurve for Beth's new PowerBook and at the last moment, an impulse buy of a 20GB iPod. The Power of Steve compels me!

It took us about 20 minutes waiting in the checkout line, but we made it to the front. Then the bad news strikes: no educational discount on Panther at the store. I seem to dimly recall that Apple Stores honored edu discounts on software but not hardware, so we were taken aback. Now we'd be paying $130 for Panther and we honestly didn't need to. What to do when you're at the front of the line with credit card in hand? Suck it in and buy it anyway. The Power of Steve compels me!

In retrospect, it was kinda neat, but I don't know that I'd do it again unless I had better plans for that 10% discount and wanted to win a free Mac. :-) I didn't really get The Vibe that you do from, say, a MacWorld or WWDC event. it'd probably be more fun if we knew other people there.

[1] Why Another war, you ask? Well, it's kinda simple really. Since I work for Aspyr, I can pretty much get their games for free, and the same holds true for MacSoft. I haven't worked directly for MacPlay, so their games are the ones I usually buy, and usually when cheap. AvP2 and NOLF2 hadn't hit that magic price level yet, and I had the rest of their titles, so Another War it was.