I want to echo this post. I just got off the phone with Apple and they are well aware that they are not delivering on what was promised. They are manually taking all info and will be back in touch in 48 hours with a solution. They've said that they are looking to prioritize IUP upgrades over the next couple of weeks so that we can get our phones. I highly suggest anyone who had the same issues I had to call and ask to speak to someone in the IUP department.
Not worth it to me. I ended up just ordering mine and paying for it up front. I'll buy out the contract for the rest of my IUP 6S+ and sell it once I'm sure I 100% own it.
The reason I'm choosing not to wait for a solution which may or may not come is because there's no guarantee this won't happen again next year. 0% financing is great but not if I have to deal with being locked out of ordering my upgrade again next year or the year after that. I would rather pay it all today and know nothing is stopping me from ordering the next time I want to upgrade. The only other thing I'm sacrificing is a guaranteed sale price at 12 months. No biggie either.
And when you factor in that now, you're likely to not get an iPhone until at least October and perhaps even November by the time they sort this all out, you're looking at 2 or 3 extra payments into the program. And next year you'll have to pay those extra 2 or 3 payments to upgrade because your new contract didn't start until October or November.
So between that and the hassle factor involved with checking their site on a daily basis until the model I want becomes available, even if you lose 1 year worth of interest on $1000 or get back slightly less than 50% of your purchase price on resell, the difference is so negligible as to make buying it outright upfront a push.
The funny part is that I decided to upgrade last year only because I had decided to go from the 6 to the plus. So, I upgraded and didn't upgrade my wife because I didn't think the "S" was a big enough of a reason to upgrade alone.
I was going to put her on the IUP this year as well. Was all prepped with 2 computer screens open so I could be filling out the application for her while placing the order for mine.
No way now. No way either of us will ever join any Apple financing arrangement.
In the 10 or 15 years I've been buying Apple products (MBPs, iMacs, Apple TV's, iPhone, iPads, etc) I've never had a moment like this where I fell like saying, "F you, Apple" but this program was just such a heinous lie. Even the screen grab people are posting in the thread shows that they were heavily intimating that you could get your new iPhone right away. Not only was that not true (and I never expected them to give IUP people priority) but they went the complete opposite and penalized people in the program.
Where they say that you'll be one of the first to get your new iPhone, they've created the program in such a way as to make sure that most people will be the last to get their iPhone.
To be fair, I don't think they did this on purpose. In talking to a few people over the last couple of days who work at Apple, they seemed really confused at why there's even a problem. Then when you explain that IUP people can only order from the stock being allocated at each store, the light bulb sort of goes off.
Not that any of them created the program but it's obvious that even people within Apple are really confused about how the program works. In my experience, that usually means a company doesn't really value the program. Nobody really fleshed it out or mapped out how the process works. They did the deal to get a deal done with Citizen's Bank and someone had to try and make it work. Some mid-level product manager was told to implement it and he or she doesn't have the kind of pull within Apple to change store allocations or the commerce flow in the Apple Store so . . . we got screwed because this was the best solution he could come up with. He checked off all of the boxes in terms of what his bosses had told him and voila, IUP.
I just have better things to do with my time than get myself involved in a company's program that was an afterthought.
