iPwned...

Man, that Apple. Steve Jobs must be a sadist. I really cannot fathom any other reasoning for why the iPhone 3G rollout has taken place the way it has. Perhaps AT&T had a hand in the matter as well (perhaps even playing a larger role in the final decisions), luckily they don't have the luxury of a well known figurehead for me to vilify.

I've always been enamored with the iPhone's aestetics and OS. It's just a well put together piece of machinery. The only thing keeping me from its first iteration was its premium pricing and subpar carrier. This new edition has the price aspect covered, unfortunately I'm smack in the middle of a verizon contract. The gf, on the other hand, is essentially a free agent; and so the adventure begins...

Armed with the knowledge that even with last years hype, lines essentially disappeared within hours on launch day, we ventured forth on Sunday afternoon (two days after the 3G launch). What we were greeted with was not comforting: lines snaking as far as the eye can see (provided the day is quite foggy). There are 3 Apple stores in NYC (we had already figured AT&T stores were a waste of time), the first of which we were turned away from because they had closed down the line to make sure they could accommodate everyone. And this was at like 5pm. The place closed at midnight; thats how ridiculous it was. We were told it'd be a better idea to go to the midtown - flagship - store, since it was open 24 hours. Upon arriving there we saw a line about twice as long as the other one, and this line was shut down for the day as well. How they can shut down a line at a 24 store is beyond me, and I vocalized this feeling, but was turned away in the end.

Now I'm well aware that the douchebaggery quotient, per capita, in NYC is absurdly high, but this just seemed a little excessive. I had to do some theoretical math at this point:

Apple said they sold something like 1 million units, worldwide, in the first 24 hours. NYC has over 8 million people, at least 2 million of whom are douchebags. 3 Apple stores, roughly 25 employees dedicated to iPhone activation per store, roughly 15 minutes per activation.

That's only about 300 people per hour for the entire city - about 4500-5000 per day. Now how exactly is this method supposed to accommodate such a high concentration of tools? You'd be a fool to assume they wouldn't all demand the newest, latest immediately after it becomes available (this does not apply to me nor my associates since I have accurate appraisals of our buffoonery readings on file). And this mandatory in-store activation just threw a gorilla sized monkey wrench in the mix. Boo.

In any case, she decided to wait until the middle of the week, hoping the lines would be more approachable in that environment. Alas, they were not. We were again told that the line had been shut down (this time at about 5pm). Upon further questioning I was told that the line was currently about 3 hours long and they cutting off sales at 1130. Since it was like 5 o'clock, this didn't really add up. We figured they were just bs'ing to stop the influx of people getting off of work, so we decided to get some drinks and come back later on. 4 hours later we get back and the line has like 5 people on it, yet it's still closed. After respectfully arguing with the "bouncer" of the line, we decided to just go into the store and try to ninja ourselves into the iPhone section. That didn't work either (we even saw people attempting the same thing get booted). In defeat we left the store, and saw the line had miraculously opened up again (what a surprise). There were already like 15 people on the line but we got on anyways. An hour later she had her hands on a unit and I had a headache. This whole miserable process took about 7 months off my life through stress alone, yet I maintain a level of serene calm right now...