No White Phones in the US
I'll avoid the obvious racial joke here....
Quick recap of the day: June 15, 1am, following a stream of UK Twitterati, I learned that the Apple Store was going to go up in 2 min-- and my UK friends were right. I spent the next hour trying to get in a pre-order. Yes, me and 1 billion folks in four other countries and various time zones. I'll not question the wisdom of launching five countries at once except to say that it wasn't..... wise.
At 2am I go to bed- after all, I work full-time in order to pay for things like... iPhones. Daughter rose at 6:30am to attempt order. We all hang at the AT & T ping. 7am I drag myself out of bed and make one last attempt before work. Nada.
At noon, after attempts via the AT & T site, the Apple Store App and the Apple Chat line, my daughter finally gets through, to find out that she is not eligible for the discounted phone. Her previous phone stopped working; she bought a 3G (not even 3GS) in March as a "temp" phone to get her to the 4th...so they declare her ineligible. AND the features on the new OS4 software being released will not work on the 3G. She is double-ticked. She contacts AT & T Cust Svc. Nada. She elevates her contact to AT & T Corporate offices. I think she has a legitimate request for an exception- let alone the fact that we have been 12 year customers of AT & T/Cingular. They have enough of my money to comp us this once.
4pm- randomly I try to get on at work. I get farther on this attempt but, after 35 min of "processing" I bow out. My work server is run on a "quad core," of four hamsters and four wheels. Other attempts simply result in error messages. I'm feeling a lot of hate toward AT & T and I'm not terribly happy with Apple right now, either. Is a new phone really worth all of this?
8:30pm, almost hesitantly, I attempt a pre-order. Oh, look- the delivery date is now sometime after July 2. I again re-think the order. I get to the phone choice and seriously vacillate between the 16 and 32. I realized I currently have a 32 3GS and won't downsize. Then the data plans, then the Apple Care protection (don't ever buy ANYTHING without it),and my total is nearing "half a G." Used an Apple credit I'd saved to bring it down a bit, but still swallowed hard.
All this pain and I have to pay, too? It's the first time I ever questioned my purchase. Ever. Maybe a few of you hit this same point at some time today. Maybe it's fatigue; my net sleeping hours were four from last night. Several hundred dollars and I won't even get the chance to be "first." Does the 3GS still work? Yes- very well. My daughter may end up with it unless we find a really nice human being at the AT & T corp level. But, this kind of experience makes the CDMA version (I'm told it will release at the end of this year) and another carrier (Verizon) pretty attractive.
It's one thing to stage a major world wide event-- it's quite another to actually pull it off. Apple and AT & T failed in the latter and it's left a very bad taste in the mouths of many.