Shrouded in black and still largely hidden from view by barricades, the sleek new Apple Store in downtown Palo Alto will open Saturday, Oct. 27, at 10 a.m., company officials have announced.

The relatively quick announcement leaves little time for hype prior to its opening, save for an email sent to Apple users and a brief mention on the company's website.

But the new 16,600-square-foot, two-story building at 340 University Ave. is constructed to be inviting, with a clear-glass facade framed by stone-paneled vertical columns so passing shoppers can see what is happening inside. It will have new product displays, more training and workshop sections and an enlarged Genius Bar to help customers, according to a company announcement.

The new Apple isn't falling far from the tree. It is situated two blocks west and across the street from its predecessor at the seismically unsafe 451 University Ave. But excitement is growing among Apple aficionados and its ever-expanding base of just regular folks.

"Any Apple Store that opens, people will be trying to get there. The stores are always crowded. It's real exciting," said 20-something Jason Lee as he surfed the Internet from his iPhone outside the Apple store at Stanford Shopping Center on Wednesday.

The Apple Store at Stanford is dwarfed by the 6,369-square-foot new Microsoft retail store, which opened April 19 just two doors away. But only a handful of people on Wednesday were visiting Microsoft compared to the controlled chaos at Apple. Inside the small store, which some call the "Apple store Mini," a dozen employees in royal blue polo shirts with white Apple logos helped a crowd of customers who had trouble not bumping into each other.

Henriette Langdon, a San Jose State University professor in communicative disorders and sciences (speech pathology), waited outside for her appointment to learn how to get her new MacBook Air laptop to read DVDs. She said the new downtown store would be a welcome improvement if it offers more space and a larger Genius Bar with faster customer service.

"Having a larger store will certainly improve on the backlog, especially with the holidays coming up," she said. "I need a human being to interact with ... Those of us who are a little older need the personal touch," she said.

Emerging from the current downtown location, Christine Bullock said she hopes for a bigger Genius Bar. "It's always super busy," she said. The new Apple building has been entertaining to watch as it has been erected, she said, with its sleek front all done up in black to obscure what awaits inside.

An Apple spokeswoman offered no glimpse of what customers will experience when the new store opens Saturday, other than to invite the public and reporters to come to the unveiling. There will be a commemorative T-shirt giveaway to the first 1,000 attendees, the company has announced.

"It's Applesque to hide it to the last second," said Fred Balin, a former employee and member of the Apple Consultants Network certified by the company. He still has the commemorative T-shirt Apple gave out when the first Palo Alto store opened in 2001, he said.

"The concept of the retail stores was genius. A bricks and mortar store in the Internet age?" he said.

The new downtown store seems to herald a retail-store branding makeover. Apple has not yet announced it, but a 12,100-square-foot Apple Store is planned for Stanford Shopping Center. It will be nearly 23 feet tall in a single story and features a tall glass cube with an overhang, as reported in the Palo Alto Weekly's Shop Talk column in May. The store is still in the steel girders phase, located near Neiman Marcus.

Balin said, given Apple's growth since the first downtown store opened and its transformation from a computer company to a consumer-products megalith, he expects the new store will be "a reboot of the operating system" for its retail chain. The retail chain has grown to about 380 stores in 13 countries, according to Apple.

"I'll miss the store that is there now. I have some very good memories," he said. "But it's going to be the central gathering place for everyone to gather in this area."

He said he assumes there could be a presentation area to demonstrate the products. They've been using the word "prototype" to describe the new store, he said. "That seems to indicate it will be different."

The store was designed when the late cofounder Steve Jobs was still alive, Balin said. "You can never really outguess what he was thinking. It's hard to think of them changing things around" since Jobs died from cancer in early October 2011.

Balin said he believes the new store will symbolize all that Apple has become since Jobs returned to the company and turned it from a flagging computer company to arguably the most innovative consumer-products firm of the modern age. "It will symbolize the incredible success they've accomplished," he said.

He recalled when the precursor to the Apple Store, ComputerWare, was a chain that sold only Apple products. Before Jobs returned to Apple, Balin recalled seeing him purchase an educational program.

"He must've thought to himself, 'I can do this so much better.' And of course, he did."

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