Delayed gratification

If you happened to watch my Twitter feed yesterday (that shows up under “What’s Brad doing?” at the top of the right sidebar), you would have seen that I ventured over to the Apple Store in Penn Square Mall yesterday over an early lunch over to see what was going on and if I might be able to get my hands on the new iPhone 3G. This video will give you some idea of what I found when I got there …

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Now, to be honest, I was generally expecting a long line, but (foolishly) optimistically hoping for the best. What I found was just about the opposite of “best.” The line stretched from the Apple store all the way to Dillards (in the same wing of the mall near the west exit) and back around again to around to the stores across from the Apple Store. And the line was hardly moving at all… more than three hours after the store had opened. I knew the wait would be longer than I was willing to tackle, so I quickly abandoned that idea (because I hate waiting in long lines) and met Karla for lunch.

When I got back to the office, I was glad I didn’t bother. There were cascading delays on launch day with people having to wait even longer — much longer — than expected as the Apple activiation servers crashed and burned several extended times throughout the day and the iPhones couldn’t be activated or took a very long time to complete the process. I later heard that some people waited 4 to 6 hours (after the store had opened and the line began moving) before it was all said and done. Even as a diehard Apple fan and iPhone lover, there’s no way I would tolerate that kind of wait, and I didn’t and chose to wait another day. Delayed gratification — for me, for Karla and for the girls, who are inheriting our hand-me-down first-generation iPhones.

Now, Apple just didn’t plan this out very well, in my humble opinion. They tried to make too big of a splash by launching too many things at once — the Mobile Me service (which replaced .Mac (dot Mac), the iPhone 2.0 firmware update/upgrade, and the new iPhone 3G. It turned out to be a colossal meltdown and a huge PR nightmare for the usually PR-savvy, masterfully marketed Apple.

Enthusiastic existing .Mac subscribers and new subscribers were checking out (or trying to) the new Mobile Me service, which was promoted as “Exchange for the rest of us” with Push email, Push calendar and Push contacts being the biggest, most sought-after features. That created a load on those servers and it was mostly down all day (and the previous 24 hours as Apple worked on the conversion process).

First generation iPhone users were clamoring for the 2.0 update/upgrade and overloaded the Apple servers even before the upgrade was officially released, which caused frustration (and insane outrage) in the process as it was delayed, down, slow, down, intermittent, down and generally an unpleasant experience. The 2.0 upgrade required the same activation servers as the new iPhone 3G purchases used, which compounded the already overloaded problem.

I assuaged my delayed gratification by upgrading my current iPhone to 2.0 when I got home from the office yesterday. It ran pretty smoothly for me, so Apple must have gotten a handle on the onslaught. I’ll write more later about 2.0 and the new Apps feature that it has with all the cool Apps available to download.

Finally, Apple should have planned or thought through the iPhone 3G launch a little a lot better. It turned about to be the biggest disaster. The activation process was a nightmare and ruined an otherwise exciting moment for a lot of new iPhone 3G owners, a large chunk of whom were first-time iPhone buyers and first-time Apple customers — not a good first impression… not very good at all. The bottleneck was the activation process that overwhelmed the servers (which is a bit of a puzzle to me because somebody should have tested the load on the servers ahead of time, I would think, but I’m not an IT expert, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about).

Unlike the first generation iPhone that allowed you to go home and activate your phone through iTunes, a very convenient and pretty darn painless process, Apple and AT&T required activation at the time of purpose to try to prevent the minority of buyers from “jailingbreaking” the iPhone to use with other carriers. Well, that plan didn’t go so well — at least on launch day. AT&T stores and eventually some Apple Stores sent people home to activate their phones on their own through iTunes — the exact same way as the first generation. It kind of messed up their (monopolistic) plans!

There had to be a better way. Maybe one way is that the only way the phone would activate is through the iTunes store that only activated it for AT&T service unless you paid the “free-and-clear” $400 premium to have an AT&T-less iPhone. Both companies were so desperate to lock people into this forced marriage that it bit them both in the ass yesterday, in a big way. It diminished the luster of the launch big time. It diminished the experience of the iPhone buyer big time. It diminished Apple’s reputation in no small measure; AT&T’s reputation doesn’t have far to go in being much more diminished.

So, as things calm down, perhaps even today, we’ll stop by the Apple Store to see what insanity still remains and possibly get our hands on new iPhone 3G’s in the next day or so. You’ll be the first second to know.