iPhone 3G launch stories

On-site reports by Matt Saye and Don McAllister

Launch Day kicked off in New Zealand and didn’t wrap up until the next day in some other part of the world. When it was all said and done, the 3G iPhone had officially gone on sale in two dozen different countries to much fanfare and long lines. In at least some instances, the crowds were reported to be even larger than last year’s original iPhone launch. Maybe it’s the $199 price tag. Maybe it’s the expanded feature set. Or maybe now is just the iPhone’s time to go mainstream after spending the past year suggestively working its way into the public consciousness.



We’ve assembled on-site reports from lineups at Apple Stores and AT&T Stores from around the world, to give you a taste of how Launch Day went for everyone. As you’ll see, it wasn’t a perfect launch, with activation issues which forced stores to improvise at one point. But nonetheless there a whole lot of excited new 3G iPhone users out there right now. Here are a few of their stories…

I live in a small university town (pop: 12,000 during the school yeah, about 9,000 during the summer) so when I went to my local AT&T store on July 10 to make sure I was eligible for an upgrade and they told me to get there very early, I laughed. But just to be safe I got there at 6:30 a.m., a full hour and a half before the iPhone went on sale and sure enough there were already 14 people in line ahead of me. By the time 8 o’clock came the line was between 60 and 70, which is considerable for the size of my town.

At this point, if you’re reading this you’ve probably heard about the longer lines and longer waits at both AT&T and Apple Stores, and Oxford, Mississippi was no exception. AT 8 o’clock the AT&T employees let in the first 10 people in line and by 9:10 not a single one had left the store. However, after the initial confusion, during which the store owner came out to apologize for the long waits and explain what was happening, he said they had been on the phone with other stores and worked out some of the issues, and by the time I entered the store around 9:20 that was obvious. While it may have taken over an hour for the first customers to have their phones activated, I left the store around 9:45, not the best wait time, but far better than my predecessors. Part of the reason for speeding up the lines was after purchasing the phones, customers were given the option of taking the phone back to their houses and activating through iTunes there, rather than waiting in the store and clogging up the line. I chose to have mine activated in the store simply because I was there, had already waited this long, and wanted to just have it over and done with. Besides, I didn’t have to go to work until 2 pm, so I could afford the wait.

Once I got home, though, the real frustration kicked in. I had no problem waiting in line for as long as I did; I actually kind of expected it, despite my scoffing at the AT&T employees the day before. However, once I got home, ready to sync my contacts, music, and a few free apps I’d downloaded the night before, I found that I could not add anything at all to the iPhone until it was registered through the iTunes store (a process that is apparently different than the “tethering” the AT&T employees did in-store). Like many (if not all) new iPhone owners that day I was met with constant errors saying iTunes could not connect with the iTunes Store. It was a process of plugging in the iPhone, waiting for it to connect, receiving the error, unplugging and repeating. It was roughly noon by the time I was able to actually connect to the iTunes Store, although to be fair, once I made the initial connection, I was able to breeze through the registration without any more lagging, even when it made more connections to the Store.

After that connection, though I have had nothing but a positive experience. The app store works great (and so do the apps I’ve downloaded). The phone is a dream to use – easy to use, intuitive, and FUN.

So all-in-all my iPhone activation process took roughly 6 hours from arriving at the store to having it fully functional–3 if you don’t count the time spent in line– and the question that my friends have all asked me is: “is it worth it?” Well, let me see, I had fun talking to the people standing in line; I managed to get the 2nd to last black 16GB iPhone in the store; I had a long wait that was expected but a longer one that wasn’t. Oh, and I got an iPhone that I’ve been wanting ever since I saw the initial announcement at the 2007 MacWorld Expo.

So could the Day One process have been better? Yes. Were there flaws that should have been foreseen that were frustrating? Definitely. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

A bit late but I thought I’d best complete the story of the iPhone 3G launch fiasco from my perspective for posterity.

As you may be aware from my previous post, the iPhone I’d ordered online had been cancelled by O2 so if I wanted a phone, I had to take my chance with everyone else at the O2 store on Friday 11th.

Just to step back a day, the V2.0 of the iPhone firmware had been leaked and I’d managed to upgrade my 1st gen iPhone to the new firmware and access the new App store – magic. From my early exploration, it quickly became apparent that the GPS feature was likely to be a killer feature so I sort of decided that I’d take my chance getting in line on Friday.

Checking with the O2 website for what I needed to bring to the store, I thought it best to take a print out of my account and logged on to do just that. Whilst logged on, I stumbled across a “My Orders” page and lo and behold, there was my online order for the iPhone that I’d been notified had been cancelled.

Thinking there was no way they could screw up so badly, I sent off an email (this is the day before launch) asking them to confirm the online order had in fact, been cancelled as the page didn’t show any sign of the order being cancelled. I didn’t worry too much as the O2 site did say that anyone due for an iPhone via courier tomorrow would receive a confirmation text before 6pm on the Thursday. No worries then!

So 6pm came and went so I decided to take my place in the line on Friday.

I set my alarm for the following morning and went to bed.

I awoke an hour earlier than intended at 5:45am due to the fact I’d set the alarm incorrectly. Ah well, must have been an omen!

I set off for my local O2 store and arrived in the summer rain at around 6:45am.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only lunatic and to my delight, found another two people in the queue before me. Always guaranteed to meet a great bunch of people at these events! By 8:02am the line had grown to over 25 people which for a relatively small store, I found astounding! The first guy in the line was Peter McCullogh and Peter shot a short video and posted it to Vimeo.

At promptly 8:02am, the doors were opened and the first four of us were let into the store. As there were 5 staff to 4 customers, I thought this should be quick and painless. Ever the optimist.

So they started to gather details and started to process customers one and two.

As I said, they started but didn’t get very far.

All the necessary internal systems they needed to process the orders failed or they couldn’t log in.

Can someone tell me in this day and age why a technology company doesn’t have the capacity for all of their stores to access their internal corporate systems simultaneously? Now this isn’t 13,000 requests per second as they stated they received on Monday, but probably 2 or 3 reps from a couple of hundred stores – unbelievable!

Now at least we were in the store unlike the 20 or so customers left outside.

So we waited whilst the staff made various calls and sent emails to find out what to do.

And we waited…

Thirty minutes in, a quick check on my email and there is an email from O2. Yes, you guessed it!

Dear sir, your online order we said was cancelled has not been cancelled. In fact, it has already been dispatched and should be with you today! We suggest that you refuse delivery so that this order gets cancelled.

Unbelievable!

So anyway, fifty minutes had passed and the store finally get an email to revert to manual processes and just use paperwork to process the upgrades.

Ten minutes later, we’re on the street with our new iPhones.

The store had 4 16GB phones and approx. 16 8GB phones so I’ve no idea if everyone in the line eventually got a new iPhone.

So I dashed home, way, way behind on my usual production timetable for the weekly screencastsonline show. I swapped the SIM out of my existing phone, plugged in the new iPhone 3G into iTunes and 20 minutes later after restoring my current iPhone image I was away and running. Thankfully I managed to miss the later activation problems that most other people seemed to experience.

Another half an hour later and what turns up but the courier with a second 16GB iPhone. With a heavy heart, I turned him and the other iPhone away.

So now I have my iPhone 3G fully activated and working. I’ve been having a play with the 3G and the Apps and the GPS but I’ll leave my deliberations on those for another posting.

So Apple went against my prediction that they would not go with a “Big Bang” approach to the role out of MobileMe, the App Store and the iPhone 3G.

More fool them!