Got my iPhone 3g today, quick and painless.

[GhostToMost]

I have been contemplating doing direct fulfillment all week.

After realizing there was an apple store ~120 miles away (Jacksonville, FL). I decided to take a shot. I checked availability last night and it showed there were all out of stock. I took a stab in the dark and left Savannah, GA at 7AM this morning. I arrived at 9AM, there were 3 people in line. I was the fourth. The guy said there should be TON of phones in today and no problem getting one.

At 10AM the doors opened, an apple rep helped and after 10 about minutes I walked out with my iPhone. Cheers to apple.

Now I have to figure out how to use it.

 

[Julien]

You drove 240 miles? That's not quick or painless.

 

[GhostToMost]

You drove 240 miles? That's not quick or painless.

There is only 1 AT&T store in Savannah; so you can imagine how long the direct fulfillment list is.

At least gas is cheap.

 

[TurboSC]

There is only 1 AT&T store in Savannah; so you can imagine how long the direct fulfillment list is.

At least gas is cheap.

Yea I'm going to SCAD in Savannah, and let me tell you that one AT&T store is really killing me.

I've contemplated the drive, but that's quite a distance... I did pre-order it, said it would be 7-21 days.

 

[rust.puppet]

i live in a small city with a at&t in it and no apple store for atleast 100 miles and you better believe i'd wait for them to be in stock. although to my knowlage they have ALWAYS had them in stock since day one of the release.... i know ALOT of people in my town and nobody has them, not even first gen iphones.

so when i get my college check arround august 30th it'll be a 10 minute process as well.... although if i drove as far as the OP i'd of spent more in gas than on the phone unsubsodized (which i am).

 

[dacreativeguy]

This whole "in store activation" is a big joke. Instead of changing the model for selling the iphone and causing a bottleneck in the sales process, all Apple needed to do was require a service plan purchase when buying an iphone on the Apple web store.

Step 1: Click buy from the iphone product page
Step 2: Choose a plan
Step 3: Checkout
Step 4: ATT starts your account and Apple ships the iphone
Step 5: You receive the iphone, plug it in and activate through iTunes

From what I've read about launch day, Apple and ATT were doing steps 1-4 in the store and then sending customers home for step 5 because the activation servers were overloaded. So there is really no reason why Apple couldn't have preserved the excellent customer experience of the first iphone while still thwarting the unlockers. So sad...