Watch: Micro Center’s opening day was a glorious celebration of PC geekery

Walking through aisles and aisles of quality computer hardware has a charm that just can’t be beat. And doing so alongside other enthralled nerds is even better—which is exactly what drew out PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray and Will Smith for opening day at the new Micro Center location in Santa Clara, CA.

As you’ll see in the video on our YouTube channel, the store is full of bright polished floors, displays backlit with glowing colored lights, and sharp employees. It’s exactly the right feel to draw in tech enthusiasts, especially after Micro Center’s long absence from the San Francisco Bay Area (13 years!). Many who lined up to visit the store with no intent to buy. Rather, as more than one person tells Adam during their interviews, they showed up for the vibes.

How great is it inside? Everything you need for geeky projects is right there. You want mechanical keyboards, no problem—there’s a whole long aisle of them, plus additional short rows. Monitors? A whole wall of them sit on the right side of the store. Tons of laptops to browse through, including gaming ones? Just walk straight in from the entrance. Networking equipment? Yep, got that, including Ubiquiti gear. 3D printers and filament? A big section sits at the back. Makers can find Raspberry Pi and Arduino components, too. You can even buy toys like cool Lego sets and wood model kits. And naturally, you can get your hands on CPUs, GPUs, coolers, SSDs, cases, and pretty much everything you need to build a PC—including LCD screens for monitoring your temps or other key stats.

In the words of one of our interviewees, whom I caught off-camera standing at the intersection of several aisles looking around, just taking everything in: “This is awesome.” Yeah, dude. It really is. 

About the only thing better is the interview shenanigans in this video…plus the others from the same Micro Center tour. Subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube to catch those hijinks, and be sure to supplement the fun with our weekly podcast The Full Nerd, too.