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/

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?

Just wondering.

How could one possibly know that they would be waiting 12 hours - 12 HOURS from the beginning of the wait till the end. Has there ever in the history of a product launch been a wait in line (not including waiting before the store opened) until you had a chance to sit down and actually do the order? Most people I was in line with expected a 3-4 hour wait and were prepared for that, but as the day drew on, it was clear that an unknown number of additional hours would be required.

NOBODY expected to wait for 12 hours. Clearly AT&T didn’t expect people to wait that long because all they did was start signing people up for direct fulfillment - the equivalent to ordering the damn thing online, which you couldn’t even do on Apple’s Store! Hell if the people in line were given the option to do that, there would have been no 12 hour wait. People would have simply signed the forms and went home.

Everybody knew it was going to be a PITA dealing with Apple or AT&T on Friday. Everybody. We knew it the second it was confirmed that activation would have to occur in store. If you chose to go you made the choice to deal with it.

I personally didn’t go precisely because Apple has its head so far up its ass with iPhone 3G. Apple caved on some of the most important aspects of what made buying the original iPhone such a pleasant departure from the typical BS associated with buying a new mobile phone.

If the availability was guaranteed, 100% of people would have sold through at the mall. Since Apple and AT&T couldn’t get their crap together a far less than 100% of people were able to complete their transactions in the store, not counting the large number who simply gave up frustrated and went away.

There were SO MANY simple things that Apple could have done to solve the problem. If you’re having an IRU issue - start putting together different lines so that quick number port users can move quickly and the people who have to all call AT&T can do that. Check eligibility EARLY in the line. Don’t wait until people have been in the lines for HOURS before you come out and check. There was one gentleman who had been there for over 10 hours before they came out and started doing that - the guy had AT&T saying that he was eligible, but because the Apple system had different requirements from AT&T APPLE COULDN’T SELL HIM A PHONE! Wait, wasn’t this a partnership - weren’t you both launching the product in your respective stores? Ah I see, it never occurred to either party to actually do a test to see if the process would work. Normally you find these issues in PRE-SALES! AT&T considers any user that receives a discount from work to be a business user and their accounts got flagged in Apple stores is being ineligible to upgrade. Apple just wanted to deal with individuals so it never occurred to them that a large number of the users that would be in line would be people who work for companies where they get discounts on their service. Amazing clusterfuck of incompetence on both side.

Lots of Apple apologists will write all of this off to launch issues, but there is a systematic issue with Apple at this point - hell there are significant performance issues with even the 2.0 firmware. Apple is bursting at the seams. They are rushing products to market at this point and it shows. It also shows that they are either willfully clueless that this is happening (how could people in the store even think this made sense, how could they NOT know that mobileme was down) or their entire communications process is horribly flawed.

SOMETHING is wrong in Cupertino at this point and consequently I’m glad, very glad that they are taking a step back with 10.6 an just trying to get things to work right for a change. Hopefully the iPhone team will be given the opportunity to do the same because its all starting to head towards crap at this point.

Never before have so many owed so much pain and suffering to so few.

Here in Australia it went amazingly smoothly for myself, I spent a total of zero minutes waiting in line as an existing Optus customer and iPhone pre-deposit holder, and the actual activation of the iPhone involved popping in my existing sim card from my previous mobile and plugging it into a set up laptop for about 20 seconds before handing it back to me and sending me on my way.

Hopeful non-deposit holding customers who had arrived during the deposit-holder-only 2 hour early opening period began to be served as I was leaving the store - an hour early for them - because there were no deposit holders left.

Admittedly, customers who had not bothered to look into and pre-choose the available post/pre-paid plans and associated conditions seemed to be having a tough time getting through the activation process - but really, who’s to blame for that other than themselves.

So perhaps it’s only iPhone customers in America with AT&T that are having a sucky experience? Why not ask your readers for their experiences?

My wife was amazed at how easy the whole process was. The trade-off is that I have to wait a few days for my phone to come in, but I’m OK with that. I don’t -*have*- to have it today. I can wait a few more days, and not having to camp out and/or wait in line all day is worth the wait.

I guess I just don’t get why someone who has an iPhone would be eager to get in the line this year. Last year, you walked away with a revolutionary phone. This year, we all know going into the launch that it’s a mild improvement on the hardware side, and the old phones get the really good stuff, which is new software. I suspect part of your disappointment might be that at the end of it all, you’re not walking away with so much revolution in your pocket.

But you knew that already. So why’d you get in line?

or maybe it can