Apple’s brand is on the line. Apple’s customers, as fanatic as we are, are only this way because Apple makes amazing products and has amazing service. If Apple continues to botch product launches like iPhone 3G and MobileMe, I feel they will lose some of their early-adopters who act as evangelists driving so many people to switch to Apple every year.

I don’t see why you would expect hours of waiting in line on launch day to be fun. Launch days are always hectic at best.

Yes, launch days are hectic. It was the manner in which this launch played out that made it different. Again, I don’t mind standing in line, or the occasional problem, but this year the slew of technical glitches and ill-prepared staff made for an arduous day at best. The article was opinion… mine. I know a lot of other people who had similar experiences, one who waited 14 hours only to NOT get a phone.

@Bob

This was the largest CE release in history (based on $$ value, adjusted for inflation), nearly tripling the previous largest release (the original iPhone). How, exactly, do you predict, let alone stress test for that? And, for the record, how do you know it couldn’t handle the same volume as last year?

How do you plan for that? They certainly did have a big release, but to sell that many phones they had to manufacture that many! They certainly knew they were going to sell many more than last year. They could very well have stress tested their systems to at least the number of units manufactured for opening weekend.

@Gregory Pierce

I can’t believe the mall security guards at Lenox! They actually told one child (about 6 years old) he couldn’t sit down after he’d been standing in line from 8 AM to about 4 PM. If I was his parents, the Mall office would have gotten a call from me! I think, at Lenox anyway, a accumulation of many factors ended up setting the tone of the day. I did find it hilarious that the obese security guards had to travel the mall on Segways because they were too lazy to walk, and then told mall customers who were waiting to spend hundreds of dollars in the mall they could not even sit in mall-provided chairs.

Blaming the victim seems to be very popular in the world today. Something goes wrong – well you shouldn’t have done that. Car blows up – well you shouldn’t have purchased a hybrid. Were the consumers responsible for being anything other than consumers? When did it become a crime for a person to walk to a store on launch day and get a product? Why are those people somehow stupid?

Guess its just a sign of the times today that instead of blaming the people who are REALLY responsible for the problem and complain to them and demand that THEY do the right thing, we take the easy way out and blame the victims of the process. I guess you blame the people who went to use MobileMe yesterday during the outage, or the people who upgraded their phones when the firmware came out, or people for not being able to afford gas to drive to work.

May you should focus on who is accountable and blame them instead of blaming those that suffered as a consequence of their actions.

You make a decent point (re: availability vs. process), but again, you’ve missed the point:

There was no reason to line up for the iPhone in the first place other than to get it on day one. That’s why I have no sympathy.

Apple screwed up, yes, but we knew that before launch day. We expected problems. We expected a wait. Sure, it ended up being much longer, but if you stood in line for twelve hours for an iPhone, you don’t get to complain about it. You’re the fool who chose to do so. Now, had Apple simply let you buy the phone and take it home unactivated and without the contract (like the first iPhone), you wouldn’t have had the wait. iTunes probably still would have had problems activating the phones, but the wait itself could have been mitigated.

The writing was on the wall long before 8am Friday morning.

There IS no shortage. It just takes forever to go through the process of getting set up. Even if it only took 10 minutes (which it doesn’t), the average Apple store has 10 people working in parallel to get people done. So if you have only 100 people trying to get the product it still takes almost two hours just to process them all. Unfortunately the process was taking closer to 25-35 minutes per person. Doesn’t take much to do the math on that one and see that in-store activation was a disaster waiting to happen. And what’s worse, they wanted to do EVEN MORE such as setting up your phone and making sure your contacts were transferred and showing you how to use the features (this coming from an Apple rep in the store). With that use case people would have died in line waiting to get into the store.

http://www.bitburners.com/articles/apple-iphone-3g-frequently-asked-questions/4092/