APPLE COMPUTER’S second company-owned store in the region opened last weekend in Seattle’s rapidly upscaling University Village shopping center.

As was the case with Apple’s Bellevue Square opening earlier this year, a line snaked out over the mall grounds on opening night. By the time the first customers were let in at six, guys (and it was almost all guys) at the end of the line would have more than an hour’s wait.

The new Apple Store, built from scratch on the onetime site of an A&P supermarket (remember those, anyone?), is much bigger than the Bellevue store, which had to be squeezed into an ex-Hallmark shop site. Thus, it more fully expresses the company’s aim of providing a real-world equivalent to the Mac OS’s clean, uncluttered, dignified aesthetic of cyberspace.

Live entertainment was provided on Friday by a subset of the UW Marching Band (above), and on Saturday with a 15-minute free set by Euro power-poppers the Raveonettes (below).

(Incidentally, the Apple Store’s free Wi-Fi signal reaches next door to the Ram sports bar, but just barely.)

Meanwhile, other businesses in the neighborhood have gotten into the cyber-craze, as seen in this exploitation of an already-tired Internet catch phrase.

I could add that I walked from the Village uphill to the University District late Saturday night, past the Greek Row where rowdy frat boys rioted after midnight. I left before that happened, but could sense a tension in the air, an angry and ornery sound of “fun” emanating from many of the fraternities and rental houses on the first Saturday night of the school year.