Thomas was the first person to arrive at about 9 a.m. on Friday morning, followed by a "Mystery #2" Mac user who dropped a $40 green chair onto the sidewalk in front of the store, walked off, and never returned! Gary arrived about 2:30 p.m., and then others arrived until about midnight when the "Final 8" were set for the overnight camp-out in anticipation of the store's opening.
The store is just south of the main, older part of downtown Walnut Creek, at the edge of four square-blocks that have recently been developed into high-end stores, restaurants, a grocery store, and theaters, all anchored by none other than Tiffany & Co. jewelry on the corner next to the Apple store. There is still considerable construction on other blocks, and there are some uncommitted spaces.
The store is typical of other street-facing Apple stores: it features a stainless steel exterior, with a second-level, backlit Apple logo, and full-width windows on the bottom with center front door. The width of the store provides more room for customer circulation, and means the three point-of-sale (POS) terminals are at the front of the store. There is a 14-seat theater at the back of the store for demonstrations, and the genius bar is located along the right-central wall.
The weather was perfect: clear blue skies day and night, with a high of 83 degrees, and a low of 57 overnight. The sidewalk and metal front of the store exaggerated the heat when the sun was up, but it was simple to pull on sweatshirt at night to ward off the chills.
We learned that the left-most, huge glass window of the store was somehow broken during the week, and had to be replaced on Thursday ($$$), and that the outside is real stainless steel . We noticed that the backlit logo was also lit by the sun when it was directly overhead (there must be an opening to the roof), and later when it turned dark, that the logo backlighting was uneven (we alerted employees and they fixed the lighting problem).
The Burlingame Apple Store opening is July 26th, and the Palo Store is due for a "Grand Re-Opening" in October, after a renovation that may include new flooring. The next opening in the Bay Area after that is the San Francisco store next spring.
Someone named Kevin made what was perhaps the first purchase from the store: an educational purchase with product to be delivered later to an east coast address. Kevin finalized the deal, and then left to catch a plane back home!
The overnight group formed fairly early, arriving as early as 9 a.m. and as late as midnight. They were drawn from all ranks: students, tech support, wireless communications, publishing, graphics/HTML, nutrition advisor, Mac guru--and whatever that Mystery Man #2 did for a living! All ages were also represented. Equipment ranged from a Powerbook 17-inch, a couple of 15-inch Powerbooks, lots of iBooks, iPods, iSights, PDAs, cellular phones, headsets w/microphone (best for iChatAV conversations), and a Sidekick. As for furniture, there were four camping chairs, two hot-pink beach chairs and a director's chair.
Erica came by in the afternoon to scout out the line, hoping to get a T-shirt as a surprise present for her husband's 50th birthday! She came back later with a chair, spent some time at "dinner," and then returned early in the morning to wait for the opening.
There were two Starbucks nearby, a Barnes and Noble (open until 11 p.m.), a Safeway, and all manner of restaurants nearby. There was plenty to do until the stores closed, but most people stayed close just to share stories and learn about one another. There was lots of talk about music, films (www.imdb.com!),
During the afternoon and evening there was the usual round of window cleaning, stainless steel polishing (inside and out), and then an overnight crew hand-scrubbed the masonry flooring (rumored to be "Italian limestone") and vacuumed up the water. We learned there have some problems with the wooden flooring at the other stores, and it may be replaced with new wood or masonry.
The overnight group formed into a campfire configuration for most of the night, and fielded questions from lots of passersby during the early evening. When the pedestrians stopped walking by, we fielded questions from motorists who stopped, including two Walnut Creek police cars. There were several food runs to nearby Safeway (P.S.--Safeway, clean up your men's bathroom!).
At one point a person drove by the store in a convertible with three other people, and yelled, "What kind of donuts do you want?" We were at first skeptical the person was serious, but we yelled back, "Regular and jelly filled." About an hour later, Apple store staffer Justin Clark returned with two dozen Krispy Kreme donuts--as promised! He seemed jazzed to be working at the store, energized by the overnight group, and anxious for the grand opening.
Power for our many Powerbooks and iBooks were at a premium--we noticed that there were AC outlets atop the city's 16-foot street light standards. However, they were impossible to climb, so we couldn't plug in our extension cords or power strips. The eventual solution was to use power inverters (Lind, iJuice, generic) plugged into the cigarette lighters of cars parked on the street. One overnight had a Chevy Tahoe, and its inverter had two AC outlets that were cycled among 3-4 laptops, while an inverter in another car kept the Web cam operating. By the way, a laptop connected to an inverter, plugged into a car with a decent battery shouldn't run down the vehicle's battery. We ran the engines of the vehicles for 10-15 minutes every 3-4 hours, and there was never any trouble starting them.
Unlike our brothers/sisters waiting overnight for the grand opening of the Santa Monica promenade store, we encountered no homeless people in doorways. We did visit with people of all types who were walking by the store, and who were uniformly curious about our camp-out. In contrast to Hal Bergman's experience in SoCal, no one forgot anything--we had laptops, iSights, batteries, cords, headsets, checkbooks, etc. We also had none of the police, steam cleaning, power or relocation problems that the Santa Monica team suffered. Yikes!
Like Santa Monica's Mac-devoted, the most frequently-asked question from passersby was, "What's going on?", followed by "Why?" We could generally answer the first question very quickly, but not the second. They frequently wondered if the store was giving away merchandise (iSight drawing only), or would be offering half-off prices (!), if the computers were are own (they were), or if we were Apple employees (none were). There were very many people who had intelligent questions about the Macintosh, and we had several "Switcher" conversations with them. Others were supportive of our effort--even if they didn't quite understand it! Most were surprised that none of really "knew" each other before the overnight stay--I guess we appeared to be life-long friends. We didn't encounter anyone who was downright antagonistic, although at least two or three admitted to being "PC" or Windows users.
There were several who asked us Macintosh support-type questions about their computers and peripherals. It seemed many were still running OS 8/9, yet were anxious to take advantage of the current Macintosh software features, such as iTunes Music Store, iPhoto and iMovie. The advice was patiently given, with some subtle persuasion that...perhaps...they should make the leap to a new computer and the latest software. We encountered one man who had made the switch, but was unhappy with his purchase--nothing seemed to work correctly. We answered some of his questions, and then pointed out that Apple has a very nice Genius Bar inside every store, staffed with experts who can answer any question (with the help of the "Red Phone"!).
Overnighter Justin Dawson actually provides individual Macintosh support, and was able to make some contacts during the evening and night--if you're in the Diablo Valley area and need help, send him some e-mail.
Only a couple of people got any decent sleep. Rather, most stayed awake with the four iSight video cameras the group had, linked to the Internet with the Apple store's Airport system. We set up two iSights as Webcams with constantly updating photos of the group, and two other iSights were engaged in iChatAV conversations with people in England, France, Germany, Arizona, Boston and other U.S. cities. Most of the chats were with strangers equally curious about iSight's capabilities, and equally astonished by the quality of the sound and video. It really was incredible to comprehend that we were sitting on a sidewalk in Walnut Creek, California, linked wireless to the Internet, and then see and hear people thousands of miles away that we didn't really know, but who were joined by hardware, software and the Macintosh! As they say, "Way cool!"
One iChatAV person in Germany was a smiling man, frequently interrupted by his amazed wife, whose faced popped in-and-out into view. We encountered a firewall problem with one iSight set-up, but the software led us to the solution, which involved adding an item under the System Preferences, Sharing, Firewall tab, which opened up a port on an active firewall. The problem doesn't occur if you've never turned the OS X firewall "on."
We also had one chat that left us scratching our heads--the iSight camera showed most a head-and-shoulders view of the man, but we swear the man was wearing no clothes. No, we didn't keep his iChat address!
My iSight was linked to a Powerbook G4, powered by a Lind inverter plugged into a Honda Civic. I ran Evocam software ($20) to create time lapse movies, set to capture a frame every 20 seconds, and to both post a video frame on this Web site (during the event), and to create a Quicktime movie (I didn't record the entire night, but rather a late-night segment, and the store opening). Everything ran well, even after the sun came up and heated the interior of the car to the point that I couldn't handle either iSight or Powerbook with my bare hands--they were extremely hot! [By the way, there are interesting frames in the time lapse movie, as persons wearing a bright yellow and bright green shirt entered and left the shot, and the camera radically changed the color balance for that one frame. It's apparently best to manually set the cameras values in order to create a smoother time lapse movie.]
Another interesting discovery was, via Rendezvous, the presence of various printers inside the store. One Overnighter was able to print to a ink-jet printer ("Hi, Neo!"), and the security guard who was locked inside immediately swiveled his head to find the curious noise. He found the printer, retrieved the print-out and brought it to the front window of the store, as if to accuse us of doing it. Of course, everyone was laughing, screaming and yelling--but not admitting.
Just as the sun started to come, we broke out a digital camera and tripod, put on the self-timer and took a group photo of the Overnighters. We transferred the photo to a laptop (USB CompactFlash card reader), pulled it into Photoshop 7.0, added some captions, and then printed out a couple of copies on the store's ink-jet printer. The security guard again retrieved the print-out, and placed it on a table at the front of the store. Later, Danny retrieved the print-out, which basically said, "Thanks, Apple, congratulations on your new store, and welcome to Walnut Creek!"
At one point in the evening, we noticed that a security device control box had come loose from its Velcro (or whatever) underneath a merchandise table. Within 15 seconds, at least two other boxes suddenly dropped down, too! We alerted the security guard, who examined the boxes, but couldn't remedy the problem--perhaps the adhesive let go all at the same time.
Around 7 a.m. we moved our chairs into a line formation, heading southward. About an hour later, an nice Apple employee asked us to swing the line around the other way and point the end of the line towards Tiffany & Co. As the sun came up, it pounded on our backs, hit the stainless steel front facade, and then burned down into our faces. It was like being in a chicken broiler!---hot, hot, hot!
Around 9:15 a.m. we discarded our chairs (stuffing them into the trunks of nearby cars), and shortly after the Apple store employees all streamed out of the store, said "Hi" to the overnights and walked the entire line of waiting persons, shaking hands or giving "high-fives." They also handed out entry forms for the giveaways (10 iSights).
We learned that both Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson had flown to southern California to attend the Santa Monica store opening--we were out of luck on seeing them here!
At a minute past 10 a.m. Art Diaz (general manager of the WalCk and Emeryville stores) came out with the question: "Walnut Creek.... are you ready?!" There was a thunderous "Yes," and Art motioned us inside. The crowd trotted inside, past a double row of store employees, giving as many "high-fives" to Apple employes as they could manage. "Love Shack" by the B-52s was playing on the store's speaker system (other stores have used "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang).
The official line count just before 10 a.m. was 301 persons. I'm guessing that another 50 were in line by the time the doors were finally opened. By the time I left at 11:45 a.m., there were perhaps 200 person in line, which stretched around the corner, up the block and into an alley. We received our special "Walnut Creek" T-shirt--it was not in the traditional tube (looks like Santa Monica also gave out loose T-shirts).
There really wasn't any serious purchase plans among those at the head of the line--everyone seemed to be pretty much already equipped with laptops, and desktops back home. A couple of people wanted iSights, but most were already had a pretty good set-up.
Just before the store opened, the group decided to form an official Macintosh users group, and logged on to Apple's Web site to make the application for: Apple Store Macintosh Users Group. I was pretty much zoned at this point, and missed all the details, but do recall hearing details of everyone kicking in $10, having a T-shirt design commissioned, and meeting up for the Burlingame store opening in two weeks--who was going to buy the generator?
