Apple: The Line Begins in Palo Alto

And the lines begin.

With about 21 hours to go before the West Coast debut of the iPhone 3G, I took a drive over to the Apple (AAPL) store on University Avenue in Palo Alto, just a mile or two from CEO Steve Jobs’s house, to check out the scene. So far, things are pretty tame: There were about a half-dozen people in line.

At the front of the line, sitting in a folding chair on the corner of University and Kipling, just around the corner from the front door, was 17-year-old Danny Fukuba, a recent graduate of Palo Alto High School. Fukuba and two of his friends, 16-year-old Eric Vicenti, who will be a senior at Paly in the fall, and 19-year-old Noah Rogers, a Paly grad who now goes to Foothill College, say they took their spots in line at 9 p.m. last night. They came armed with sleeping bags, folding chairs, a mattress, an Xbox, a monitor and Guitar Hero guitars. They were actually playing Guitar Hero in the street in the middle of the night, until the Apple store stopped letting them plug into its electrical outlets.

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