U.S. iPhone Launch, More Photos, and Impressions

[Raidersmojo]

here is my take on it.

if your going to complain about long lines and activation..don't buy an iphone right away. you choose to buy the phone today and try to activate it, apple didn't tell you too, they didn't make you stand in line and then punch you in the stomach.

tons of people with iphones already and people with new ones are all trying to get it turned on at once, no crap there are going to be delays and what not.

ITS NOT APPLES FAULT ITS YOUR FAULT.

they didn't make you stand in line, everything you did today you subject yourself too, you could of waited for the next batch of 3g iphones, but you chose not to and thats apples fault? people are ignorant.

 

[L3X]

Got my 8GB around 9:45 east coast time. I was one of the last ones that was done in store. It took about 10 mins for my iPhone to be activated.

They were going to get people signed up, then send them home as the article says.

Thankfully I got out of there.

I was about 12 back in line and there were a good 200 or so behind me at the AT&T store.

 

[everettmarshall]

Apple website no longer shows any availability, anywhere.

I know that AT&T retail had very limited availability, with what seems like an average of 20-30 units per store.

Has there actually been a complete sellout at Apple Stores today? With the ganked activation process slowing down sales, I can't imagine they've been able to process all those sales that fast.

Any insight?

 

[gusapple]

How is Apple responsible for the pricing of that service's plans?

I agree. AT&T was the one that said that customers have to activate in store. However, the reps just told me to go home and do it. There was no sense in trying to do it in store.

I am waiting in line for my place to come. (If you get an error, you just have to wait while it loads) Guess I'll have to wait a little bit longer...

 

[rednic]

Rogers .......

Was walking the dog past a rogers store at about 10:00 am EST. Big sign in the window 'Iphone Sold Out'.... Amazingly people were still waiting in line. I thought about saying something but .... I'd hate to thought of as a ..

It would seem the rumors of redirected units (away from canada) were in fact true

 

[L3X]

THIS did not happen last year. ATT sucks. I waited 5 hours, bought my WHITE iphone, then waited 1.5 hours for the "activation" and then was told...take it home and try it.

Not acceptable at all.

This is not an AT&T screw up. Everything was fine on their end. I had two non-iPhones activated and they were easy and fast.

I'm sorry to say but this was Apple's fault. There was a traffic jam at the activation process via iTunes.

 

[antielectrons]

How is Apple responsible for the pricing of that service's plans?

Who said it was. I said that APPLE REALLY FRACKED UP THE LAUNCH OF THE IPHONE IN SPAIN BY NOT SUPPLYING ANY FRACKING PHONES AND CREATING LOTS OF FRACKING FRUSTRATION BECAUSE OF ALL THE HYPE THEY HAVE BEEN GRADUALLY BUILDING SINCE DISCONTINUING IPHONE V1!

Lets face it. Apple promises but Apple cannot deliver.

 

[forty2j]

AT&T store in Woodbridge NJ is officially sold out.

Oh - and they were turning away existing AT&T customers. Only new activations allowed. The actually offered the option of adding a new line, and returning the phone & cancelling the line on Monday - and buying the phone back. For a small restocking fee, of course

 

[drchipinski]

here is my take on it.

if your going to complain about long lines and activation..don't buy an iphone right away. you choose to buy the phone today and try to activate it, apple didn't tell you too, they didn't make you stand in line and then punch you in the stomach.

tons of people with iphones already and people with new ones are all trying to get it turned on at once, no crap there are going to be delays and what not.

ITS NOT APPLES FAULT ITS YOUR FAULT.

they didn't make you stand in line, everything you did today you subject yourself too, you could of waited for the next patch of 3g iphones, but you chose not to and thats apples fault? people are ignorant.

Your are right it is the consumers fault? We should have known it would have crashed ATT's and Apple's servers.

Stupid customers!

 

[gusapple]

Apple website no longer shows any availability, anywhere.

I know that AT&T retail had very limited availability, with what seems like an average of 20-30 units per store.

Has there actually been a complete sellout at Apple Stores today? With the ganked activation process slowing down sales, I can't imagine they've been able to process all those sales that fast.

Any insight?

At the AT&T store I went to, they had 50 total iPhones. 15 were 16 GB Whites, 15 were 16 GB Blacks, and 20 were 8 GB Blacks. You had to camp out in line for one of them today.

 

[SirOmega]

if your going to complain about long lines and activation..don't buy an iphone right away.

Basically, this is what I did. Ever since they announced the in-store activation I was skeptical of the situation. I figured between that, the mediocre battery life, and the fact that I want a 32GB phone and can only get a cheap iPhone once every 20 months, I might as well just wait... if I want a 3G phone that bad I can get one in a week or two when everything is calmed down.

 

[beatledud]

Sales a slow....the line in Kenwood Cincinnati must have been 300+, much more than the line of nearly 200 when the stores opened at 6pm last year. But the employees said they had waaaaay enough stock to handle the demand. Now they just have to get people through.

When it was working, I was impressed, Apple had personal shoppers for each person and they were going QUICK. Now it's stopped.

 

[knelto]

I'm at an Apple store in Willowbrook Mall in Houston, TX. Been here since 7:45am, with 75 people ahead of me. With activation slowed I'm now at around 40th in line. There's quite a lot of people still behind me too. They said they had enough stock for all of us so that's good. No reports of being out here. Activation seems to be the main issue. Damn you, ATT.

 

[KindredMAC]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

So is ATT still charging $18 activation fee when sending people home to activate the phone themselves? I think they should waive this charge if people are having to do it themselves. Actually, I think there shouldn't even be an activation fee but I'm not opening that can of worms today.

There was the $37-or so activation fee last year for adding an iPhone to your account. But I agree, if you have to do it at home then it is considered pillaging.

 

[spazzcat]

I'm at an Apple store in Willowbrook Mall in Houston, TX. Been here since 7:45am, with 75 people ahead of me. With activation slowed I'm now at around 40th in line. There's quite a lot of people still behind me too. They said they had enough stock for all of us so that's good. No reports of being out here. Activation seems to be the main issue. Damn you, ATT.

Its not the ATT part of the activation that is the issue. It’s the Apple side of the activation that is farked up!

 

[DocNYz]

if the iTunes banner is moving and you don't have an error message ... DON'T UNPLUG THE PHONE AND TRY AGAIN! I left on in for a while and it gave me a "Let's Get Started" scree, I unplugged my second and it now can't even access the store and I'm getting 3 different failure messages. I may go back to the store to try to activate it there because they said they actually had a different version of iTunes that worked differently than our home version, through different pathways (but that's what I was told by a North Carolina employee so you never know if that's the case ...)

good luck everyone ...

 

[tmelvin]

LMAO...All I can think of is some poor person waiting in line for ours and not getting one, or getting one and then can't activate it...and that kid from the Simpsons [Nelson] pointing at them and going "HA HA"....

 

[TrevorKeel]

an "unknown error"

I camped out for my iPhone 3G (white, 16g), and was sent home by AT&T to complete the activation process.

Now, I am receiving an error message when I connect my iPhone to my iTunes:

"we could not complete your iTunes store request. An unknown error occurred (-9838)."

Is anyone else seeing this as well?

I switched to apple products in hopes of avoiding "unknown errors" so frequently seen on windows platforms. Im very disappointed.

 

[DocNYz]

I'm at an Apple store in Willowbrook Mall in Houston, TX. Been here since 7:45am, with 75 people ahead of me. With activation slowed I'm now at around 40th in line. There's quite a lot of people still behind me too. They said they had enough stock for all of us so that's good. No reports of being out here. Activation seems to be the main issue. Damn you, ATT.

even though it's slow, are they at least getting activated???

 

[kingtj]

Apple and bandwidth

I was thinking the same thing.... I realize they probably have all of these things located on different servers, using totally different connections out to the Internet. But the *bigger* question is, WHY won't Apple invest in more bandwidth overall, for their servers?

Every time they put up Quicktime video of a keynote speech? Not enough bandwidth to handle streaming it reliably, for at least 24-48 hours after it was available. Always too many people trying to view it.

.Mac accounts in general? ALWAYS seemed sluggish doing things like copying big files to/from an iDisk.

Posted the SDK beta for iPhone developers, and again - couldn't get a good download of the thing for DAYS because of lack of bandwidth on their end.

Now, iTunes can't handle all the traffic either.

all these 3g phones have 2.0 already loaded, so it has been ready for some time. Why they didn't release 2.0 a week ago to let existing users upgrade is beyond me. At least their servers wouldn't be getting hit half as hard as they are now.

Hopefully i can pick one up tomorrow morning at an Apple store. i'm hoping they will have decent inventory.

 

[ratbatblue]

In Killeen, TX: got to less well known of 2 local stores at 1:30 AM. Was alone until 6:00, when the next customer showed up. When doors opened, there were 35 or so people in line. Two that I know of got lucky and their activation seems to have worked. The rest of us in the store were sent home unactivated. Have been trying without success to activate through iTunes for an hour or so. I'm proud of all you saintly people who can let this crap run off your backs, but as for me...I find it unforgivable that Apple can be so greedy as to throw more devices out there than they can support with their own activation servers. I wasn't part of the mess last year, but I would have expected a professional organization to take steps to remedy a bad situation this year. I feel for those of you out there who stood in line and got turned away due to lack of stock, too. That could have been handled much better, just like the activation issue. I'm seriously debating having done with the whole Apple thing. They have nice equipment, but no concern for customer service whatsoever. I have enough sense to take some deep breaths and see how I feel when I'm finally successfully activated, but I don't care much for Apple as a company at the best of times, and am not liking them even more at the moment. On an unrelated note, the stock market seems to be getting ready to crash, so we could all shortly have much bigger problems than iPhone issues. Best of luck to all of us.

 

[Farani]

MINE JUST WENT THROUGH! Time to restore and get some data on here pheewwwww!

 

[jmichelt84]

I'm at an Apple store in Willowbrook Mall in Houston, TX. Been here since 7:45am, with 75 people ahead of me. With activation slowed I'm now at around 40th in line. There's quite a lot of people still behind me too. They said they had enough stock for all of us so that's good. No reports of being out here. Activation seems to be the main issue. Damn you, ATT.

yeah since ATT has nothing to do with iTunes.... this is an apple problem Damn you, Apple

 

[sterno74]

No phone for me...

So I got down there (AT&T store) and waited in line for an hour. While I was waiting, I was chatting with some folks in line. After that hour, the person I'm chatting with mentions that there is only one phone per customer. This having not been mentioned anywhere on Apple's site or by any of the AT&T employees that had been updating us on how things would proceed.

Trouble is I was getting a phone for my wife as well. So my options were to wait in line for what would likely be another hour to get just one phone, then have to go back and do the same thing again later, or just call it a day. So I gave up and went to work.

What a waste of time.

 

[P-Sax]

...but I've been stuck at the 'Accessing iTunes Store' banner for about 15 minutes now. I don't know whether to wait longer or just start over again. Either way, I still can't use my iPhone after installing the 2.0 firmware. This blows...

I got it activated. Took about 30 minutes. As luck would have it, my base station firmware came through at the exact same time, but I managed to get through just before my base station rebooted. Close one...anyway, the new firmware is cool. Have to play around with it now...