Garry Allen of IFOApplestore has the first pictures of the fabulous glass entrance to Apple’s new store on Fifth Avenue. He snapped the picture after workers removed protective cladding in the wee hours of the morning.

Allen also reports that the obligatory line of visitors has already started forming. Stormy Shippy from Texas — who was first inside Apple’s London store when it opened in 2004 — arrived just after midnight on Thursday and is camping out to be the first inside when the store opens on Friday.

The store is below ground. Visitors enter the glass cube and descend via a cylindrical glass elevator that Allen describes as a “giant syringe.” There’s also one of Apple’s signature glass staircases, which curves down around the elevator.

Allen reports:

“… the cube has another interesting feature — it’s all open to the lower floor. That is, you can walk up to the outside glass of the cube, look through and see right down into the store itself. Anyone who sees the cube, notices the Apple logo, and who then comes over to the outside of the cube to investigate will see the store and activity below, and be drawn right into the door and down the stairs. It’s another innovative and guaranteed crowd attractor.”

Bumbling around the Web, I just stumbled on Smay’s blog, where he’s written a good description of his “Mac Lust.”

“I want one of the new MacBook Pros. I have a couple of computers at work; a year-old Dell here at home; a perfectly good ThinkPad. I do not need another computer. But I want one. I have never used a Mac. Don’t look forward to having to learn a new operating system or move back and forth between Mac and PC.

I want a Mac because they are cool. And all the cool kids have them. They are sexy. There is no logic or reason at work here. This is happening in the lizard part of my brain. I’ve thought about sneaking over to St. Louis to the Apple store and putting my hands on one of the new MacBooks. But that’s like saying I’ll just lie down on the bed next to the super-model, but we won’t “do anything.” If I walk in that store, I’ll walk out $2,500 poorer. So I’m holding on. Like a junkie trying to survive the shakes and chills and maybe in the morning I won’t want that fix.”

On the DealCatcher forums, Dan Baxter writes: “So I decided to install the new Apple Boot Camp Beta to dual boot Windows XP on my Mac. Everything went great then I got this after using it for about an 30 mins.”

And here’s another one:

I guess Steve Jobs is chuckling to himself having fooled everyone today.

At Macworld in January, Jobs suggested Apple might do something special on April 1 – its 30th birthday.

Knowing that announcements of announcements stoke the fires of speculation, Jobs got everyone expecting something special from Apple — but the April Fool’s joke is to do nothing at all.

I know I’ve just spent the last three hours surfing the web for a special surpise announcement, like a new $666 Apple Uno (a kit-built computer), or a lightning “everything must got for one dollar” sale at the local Apple store.

“Ha, ha– fooled you!” Jobs is saying to himself.

Bastard.

Yesterday BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow rightly called out Apple’s hypocritical “state-sponsored piracy” response to France’s new law against vendor lock-in.

One of the big reasons the iPod took off is because of Napster and other file-sharing services. People suddenly had huge collections of digital music on their computers, but no easy way to take it with them when they left the house.

Now it appears Steve Jobs himself once agreed with the thinking behind the French law, which is to protecting consumers’ right to move content they buy from one device to another.

In a 2002 interview with the Wall Street Journal, reprinted in part at Macworld, Jobs said:

“If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.”

Compare that to what French lawmakers had to say this week:

“The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform,” Martin Rogard, an adviser at the French Culture Ministry, told the Financial Times.

Image courtesy of wpc-fr.net.

(Via SiliconBeat)

Talking of Apple billboards, MacBillboard.com is a site devoted to — Mac billboards.

The site, based in Holland, has six pages of billboard photos submitted by snappers from all over the world, like the one above of a billboard in Los Angeles by Mark Adamson.

Better, the site also has a series of ebOY-style pixelart desktop pictures, showing incredibly detailed Amsterdam street scenes full of iPod billboards and office workers sitting at Macs. Here’s the index page with each image at several different resolutions.

There’s an Apple garage sale, an iPod factory, and an Apple retail store with a line of little pixely Macheads waiting to get in. Here’s a detail:

You can also get an Apple mini store desktop — modelled after Apple’s container-sized mini shops — which has lots of space around the edges designed to be populated with the site’s custom icons, like these I-heart-iPod icons.

It’s all free, so have at it.

I’m in the process of updating my Cult of Mac book for a paperback edition, to be published in the fall.

Some of the graphics are looking a bit dated, epecially the mockups of future Apple products, like those submitted to Engadget’s recent WWJD competition.

Trouble is, I’m having a hard time tracking down mockup makers. So I’m putting out the call.

If anyone has high-resolution, print-ready mockups, and they’d like them included in a new edition of the book , please contact me at mockups -AT- cultofmac -DOT- com.

Photo courtesy of Engadget.

Slashdot commentator on Windows on a Mac:

“We’ve figured out how to put an inferior OS on more expensive hardware! That way, we can have both the frustrations of Windows and pay out of the ass for Mac. Everybody wins!”

And here’s Joy of Tech’s take. Click the pic for the entire cartoon.

It reminds me of my experience of installing Linux on a Mac a few years ago — which was, “great, now what?”

Another Slashdot poster has a good point about Windows-running Macs being attractive to businesses — they won’t:

“First, dual boot is a myth, it is damn annoying and so counterproductive. Most people dont realise that until they actually experiment it, it’s hype now, but all Linux users know it’s a pain, and I know from experience that a dual boot Windows/Linux means one thing… Windows 90% of the time. Vmware and others solutions are the way to go for people who need Windows professionaly for a given application, I can’t wait for a Mac OS X version. Second, some people try to makes us believe that companies will buy Apple PC to their employees now that they can run Windows, yeah right, serious manager will buy more expensive hardware, plus a Windows licence, so that their employees can have an Apple design and the joy of using Mac OS X out of the office… “

Cult of iPod

10 out of 10 rating: “This book is priceless. Even if someone you know has no interest in ever obtaining an iPod, they’ll love this book. Curl up in your favorite chair, make a steeping hot cup of tea, put in your buds, hit shuffle and then relax for a wonderful read.” –Macsimum News, November 23, 2005 (Read more)

Average rating at Amazon — five stars!

Reviews of Cult of Mac

 

An experiment by CNet to see whether copy-protected music files sucked the life out of player’s batteries is interesting but flawed.

According to CNet, DRM copy-protected music can decrease battery life by up to 25 percent thanks to the processing overhead necessary to play them.

But as one commentator on the story points out, the test compared protected WMA files with unprotected MP3 files. It should have compared protected-WMA to unprotected WMA, or Apple’s FairPlay AAC versus unprotected AAC.