You would think they would get the idea after the first few times.
The do seem to be spreading stuff out more this year. iTunes 9.2 came out this week, the iOS 4 upgrade (which results in older iPhones having to be reactivated) is coming out three full days before the iPhone 4 went out sale.
Remember the cluster fudge when they released the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 OS upgrade on the same day? Every new iPhone sold, and every iPhone being upgraded to the new iPhone 2.0 OS, ... all were activated (or re-activated) on the same day.
I am more worried about them being able to check the account and verify I can get it at the upgraded rate. I could care less about it actually being activated for use, I can wait a few hours for that.
AT&T said that there were 13 MILLION eligibility checks done during on the iPhone pre-order day. Spread over 24 hours, that works out to 150 eligibility checks per second. Since the pre-order didn't last 24 hours, there number done per second were even higher.
On the 24th, there will be an eligibility check done for every iPhone sold, but because iPhones take several minutes to sell each one, there's no way the number of hits to AT&Ts eligibility server will be anywhere even close to the pre-order day.
I'd think the activation process would be the most likely to have issues, with the 600,000 pre-order folks activating, plus all of the people purchasing in the stores activating.
Would it be hard to activate at the Apple store to? Because I might just have them activate it for me.
If you buy one in a retail store, they're supposed to activate it there before you walk out. All they do is open the box and plug your iPhone into one of their computers. iTunes then tells AT&T that your iPhone is ready to be activated, then AT&T sends out the activation signal (over the AT&T network, not the Apple computer). If the activation servers are screwing up, they may let you go home to complete this process yourself. It's the same process the people that pre-ordered their phones (and had them shipped) will be doing.