Well, after considerable effort, involving several hours, four different browsers, three different laptops, and a regularly crashing “Apple Store” app last week, I managed to get myself a “reservation” to pick up an iPhone 4 today at the Valley Fair Apple Store in San Jose.
This past week, my anticipation grew, and this morning, I got up early, slugged down a cuppa joe, jumped into the car and drove over to San Jose. This is what greeted me, with the Apple Store’s doors having only been open for half an hour:
That’s about a third of the line, folks. The rest of it stretched on for twice as long behind me. I’m guessing there are 12,000 people waiting to get an iPhone there, and they seemed to be processing them in the store at a rate of something like, maybe, 300 an hour… I don’t think the folks on the end of that line are getting their iPhones. And that’s the line for the folks with “reservations“.
I certainly wasn’t going to be able to get mine. I had a three-hour window where I could be there before I had to come back home: my work doesn’t stop for Steve’s or Apple’s benefit. I bailed after staring at this fiasco for about thirty minutes.
Now, I don’t know which is more aggravating: spending time, over a four or five hour period last week, struggling with Apple’s utterly broken ordering process, or having driven an hour this morning in order to stand around for half an hour in order to drive home for an hour for absolutely no purpose. A complete, utter and unmitigated waste of time, effort, gasoline and patience.
Well, not quite. As I stood there, I felt a clarity return to my mind: the influence of the Reality Distortion Field™ had been lifted.
“No phone can possibly be worth a nine hour wait, even if I could do it. It’s got a better screen, which I’d like. It’s faster, which is fine. It has a gyroscope and a front-facing camera, which I don’t much care about. Is there anything here which I couldn’t wait a month for? Or two?”
Clearly, the answer is “no”. I can wait a few weeks, or a few months, to have my life changed. I’m definitely not down with spending an entire working day, and then some, standing in an endless and scarcely-moving line, for the privilege of handing over five hundred bucks for a phone. I’ll muddle through with my 3Gs somehow.
I guess what bothers me the most is that if I’d thought about it, I’d have realized that of course, this was exactly what was going to happen.
Apple’s success with their customers has developed in them a pretty healthy contempt for their customers’ time, which I suppose is not unreasonable from their point of view. If you’ve got an audience of large numbers of sheep, fleece ‘em. We should be glad they’re not going up and down the line asking people to shave their heads or paint themselves purple in exchange for a place toward the front of the line. They could. And people would.
Not me. I’ll get one in July. Or August. Or later.
