Photos: Gearing up to enter Apple's glass cube

Apple CEO Steve Jobs stands outside the new Apple store in New York on opening day. Jobs helped design the flagship store.

About 20 to 30 people line up Friday morning on Fifth Avenue in New York, waiting for the grand opening of the new underground Apple retail store. A handful of people have been waiting outside the store since midnight on Wednesday.

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs came to the new flagship store for the grand opening.

Jobs examines the 32-foot glass cube that is the entrance to the Manhattan Apple store. With a team, the CEO helped design the structure.

Jobs and Ron Johnson, senior vice president of retail at Apple, examine fountains in GM Plaza, which sits above Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue, before Friday evening's grand opening.

A crowd of people lines up outside the site of the new Apple store on Friday to get a glimpse of Steve Jobs, as he inspects the 32-foot glass cube that sits atop the underground store's entrance.

Heavy rain and thunderstorms on Thursday and Friday could not keep these Apple fans away from the grand opening of the new flagship store in Manhattan. The store is set to open on Friday at 6 p.m. EST.

Some Apple enthusiasts traveled from as far away as Scotland and Germany to attend the grand opening of the new store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, across the street from Central Park and the Plaza Hotel.

Gary Allen, from Berkeley, Calif., has been to several Apple grand openings around the world, including two openings in Japan and the opening of the London store. He has been standing (and sitting) in line in front of the Apple store since the wee hours of Thursday morning. He runs a Web site called Ifo Apple Store where he posts a blog about store openings. He is blogging live about the Fifth Avenue grand opening.

Stormy Shippy, 20, from Dallas, is the first person in line at the grand opening of the new Apple store. He was also the first person in line at the London opening, back in November of 2004. Shippy, who owns an Apple PowerBook and an iPod, doesn't consider himself an Apple fanatic, but he says he is an Apple fan. So why is he standing in the rain all night and day? "There's really no explanation why any of us are here," he said. "It's just fun to be here and meet all the other people in line."

A die-hard Apple fan sits in the rain under an umbrella on Friday morning, tapping away on his Apple laptop as he waits in line for the doors of the 32-foot glass cube store entrance to open. If he is lucky, he could walk away with a free Intel-based MacBook. Apple is giving away new 13-inch MacBooks every hour for 24 hours as part of a grand-opening promotion.

By 10 Friday night, people lined up to visit the new Apple store had dry weather but a long wait.

The line to get into the Apple store late Friday night snaked all the way from Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue along 58th Street. A large security detail kept order.