The experience. Beside once or twice doing "Cingular" or Best Buy pick-ups and one time being on a business trip and was second in line in Oakland to get the 6 Plus (and they only had white... and my only white phone ever), I have gotten them shipped to me (except for the 15 Pro Max).
Up until 2020, I lived in a small town with a chill UPS Warehouse location. I would just roll-up around 6-6:30 am when they opened and they would pull my phone off the truck or it hadn't even been loaded yet.
Best possible way to get launch day iPhones ever!!
After I moved I got my 13 Pro and 14 Pro shipped to my house. The iPhone 15 Pro Max pre-order was a GD nightmare last year while trying to get a phone ordered on 3 separate apple devices. it was something like 26-45 minute after launch that I finally got to the order process. Shipping dates for my phone were late October, or I could pick up the phone at the Apple Store 4 minutes from my home on launch day.... So I did that.
It was a nightmare taking 3-4 maybe 5 hours to get my phone and get out of there. Hour plus in the line despite not getting there too much earlier than my appointment time. Maybe 15 min? they would ask people 50 people back if they had earlier appointments(that their were clearly late in arriving for, and pull them up to jump the queue.
Then the eSim transfer from AT&T was failing and my Apple store employee was an idiot and nothing was working, went through things like 3-4 times, got managers/lead tech etc and everyone was just giving up. By that time I was enough of an expert in the back and forth process with my 2 phones 14 pro and 15 PM as well as the device the employee was using that I did it all myself by turning off cellular on the 14, rebooting and keeping cellular off but connecting to the store Wifi, dod the whole activation process with the 15 AND used the employees phone/device myself and it finally worked...
Apple is much better than most electronic stores about having knowledgeable staff that can sometime come close to uber techy nerds that would not be considered average/normal consumers, but I still run across a lot of people that clearly don't know jack 💩 . And of course I had to hand my 14 pro over to them with IUP so I couldn't do anything the easy way. (I'm also insanely annoyed the MBP to any USB-C iPhone is still limited to USB 2.0 speeds. I Tok my 600 GB back up in addition to cloud cause I thought with high speed between my flagship MBP M2 Max would transfer the back at breakneck speeds. Apple can choke of their own namesake for not allowing max speeds between their 2 flagship, most expensive devices)
To be fair, I have had crazy awesome, deep, way past any publicly admitted or disclosed information from a few very smart/informed people there too.
Thank goodness I was able to pre-order for launch day home delivery cause doing it all by myself and sending the 15 Pro Max back at my leisure is so much better than a possible many hour in-store experience.
