Employees have been nothing but friendly and gracious, but it’s a little odd to see many preorder customers could have gotten home 30-45 minutes ago if they’d gotten in the other line by 9pm. Only preorders are still waiting.
Also, Best Buy offered to let some folks jump ahead if they signed up for a Best Buy card. Felt a little shady! I’m nearly at the front, though.
My small-town Best Buy line is now just 300 people long, down from 400 an hour ago, as buyers trickle out with the Switch 2. Employees are dressed up in Charizard and Yoshi costumes.
We’re covering this launch live... and it looks like I’ll be here a while, even though I live in a city with (checks notes) a population of just over 65,000 people!
Here’s how this same Best Buy looked earlier tonight.
They are at my local Best Buy, which has a whole wall full of the console behind the Order Pickup desk. (Check out my photos below.) But there’s no line at my local Walmart or Target, and I was surprised to find my local GameStop is gone entirely. Guess that store location closed for good when I wasn’t looking.
Best Buy, Walmart and Target all have midnight ET / 9pm PT launches today.
The SF Bay Area used to have lots of PC stores. Most got wiped out! But Micro Center has returned to Santa Clara, CA, and it’s a joy to browse. (Yes, the store reportedly sold dozens of GPUs that turned out to be backpacks; the company hasn’t yet answered my questions.)
BTW, you’ll see a special gold GPU in this video, signed by Nvidia’s CEO. It’s now up for charity, with bidding at $8,600.
The Washington Post is reporting he’s expected to sign executive orders on drones next week, suggesting they could “end Chinese drone sales in the US.”
That might be true, but the main action WaPo describes is “the executive order could direct the U.S. intelligence community to accelerate reviews of whether Chinese drone makers DJI and Autel are national security risks” — which is exactly what DJI would like the US to do. DJI products will be automatically banned unless an agency finishes that review. If there’s a review, there’s a chance.
The grand opening is tomorrow at 10AM PT, but you can already go shop — I even got a special look inside its GPU-filled stockroom! There’s a buttload of cards, including an RTX 5090 signed by Jensen (not for sale), plenty of AMD 9070, and it’ll have “very limited quantities” of Founders Edition (including the 5090 FE) tomorrow. Maybe open the boxes before you leave, though.
The highlight for me: a 12-foot-tall motorized revolving 3D filament wall which dispenses your color of choice.
There’s a native app for SteamOS now, and it’s pretty great.
