It’s Saturday night/Sunday morning and I’m finally getting a chance to sit down and write about my iPhone 3G purchase experience. Yes.. I tried to purchase the iPhone 3G on Friday but that didn’t work so.. I tried again on Saturday .. and have five plus hours, I finally walked out of the Apple Store with an iPhone 3G. Along the way, I went through all sorts of feelings and emotions about the entire purchase process and gave a good amount of thought into what went “wrong” with this ordeal (I was going to say process but in many ways, it was more like an ordeal). Let’s go back to the beginning shall we?

I fell asleep rather early on Thursday night with the intention of waking up early Friday morning. The entire world knew that the iPhone 3G would be available starting at 8am local time thus I was planning to get there at the opening hour. Of course I knew that there was going to be a line of some sort .. I just didn’t know what kind of line to expect.

The target Apple store for my adventure was going to be the store located at the 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica. Of course I knew the purchase process this year was going to be different than last year. Last year, folks were allowed to  purchase the iPhone and then bring it home for activation later on. This meant hundreds of iPhones were purchased at Apple stores in no time. This time around, no one was allowed to leave an Apple (or AT&T) store without having the iPhone 3G activated to an AT&T account. This was to prevent consumers from hacking the phone and using it for another service provider.

Unfortunately, I woke up a tad bit Friday morning and didn’t get to the store until around 8:30am. I parked my car, walked along Arizona and turned the corner onto 3rd street and came across this scene.

At first glance, I only saw the large crowd in front of the Apple Store. There were Santa Monica Police Officers on hand and they actually blocked my view of the rest of the line. Once I got past the officers, I saw the extent of the line for the iPhone 3G - it reached all the way to Wilshire!

My first thoughts were.. I can wait. Yet.. I decided to walk to the end of the line and see how fast the line would move. While at the end of the line, I managed to talk to some folks working for Jirbo.com. They were walking the lines promoting the new video games that they had available on the Apple App Store.

Somehow.. I got sucked into the line and stayed there. Mind you - Friday was still a work day for me so I took a gamble thinking that the line would move at a somewhat reasonable pace. From 8:45 am till 10am, the line moved about 100 feet.. then.. at around 10:30 to 11:00 am.. things began slowing to a crawl. Rumors were flying through the line, people were grumbling. Why was the line so slow? People were passing along information from friends or news sources about how AT&T servers and iTunes servers were either very very slow or crashing.

Then at around 11:30am, an Apple rep started walking the line announcing that folks who were existing AT&T customers but did not already have an iPhone would need to purchase the 3G phone at an AT&T store. 10 minutes later, other Apple reps contradicted the first rep stating that such customers would still be able to purchase the iPhone 3G tho they could not guarantee the price. Of course, this didn’t affect me since I had the first iPhone yet, I couldn’t help but wonder how all of this was utterly botched up.

Noon rolls around and I begin to realize that there was no way I was going to leave 3rd Street with an iPhone 3G until at least 2-3pm. That was just simply unrealistic so I finally gave up and headed into work. Four+ hours wasted in line…

The funny thing was.. what ultimately convinced me to leave was an article on Crave which talked about fights breaking out at AT&T store fronts. At the end of the posting, the author said something like this - before you head down to the Apple store today, ask yourself - do you really need the iPhone 3G today? How right he was so I ultimately left.

Saturday morning rolls around and it’s 8:30am. This time, the Apple store was opening up at 9am and I decided to try and get down there at the opening. I dress quickly and drive down to 3rd street only to see that about 150+ people had the exact same idea. WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE - don’t you have other things to do? Heck… don’t I have something else to do? Ha…

OK.. you figure that day two would be a bit smoother than day one right? Wrong. I waited in line from 9am till roughly 2pm… and mind you, there were only about 150 people in front of me. However, once I did get into the Apple store, the purchase process was extremely painless. A blue-shirted Apple rep showed me the new iPhone 3G, asked me what model I wanted, and then asked for my existing iPhone info (phone number, last four digits of my social, and zip code etc). I had a new iPhone 3G activated with my phone number in approximately 8 minutes or so. OK.. not bad.. but again - this was due to the fact that I was already an iPhone user (and also because I was a user from day one and thus eligible for the upgrade price).

In total, I spent roughly 9+ hours in line between Friday and Saturday. That is the longest I’ve ever waited in line for anything… whether it’s a Black Friday sale, a new product launch.. anything. Why in the world did I do this you might ask? Believe me when I say that I also asked that very same question to myself. There’s a good deal of human emotions involved in all of this of course. Once you spend a decent amount of time in line, you end up feeling like you might as well rough it out to the end. In fact after talking to a few people in front of me, I found out that many of them had the exact same feelings. I waited this long .. I might as well wait a bit longer right?

So.. who is to blame.

I think it’s easy to blame Apple and AT&T of course. They’re the ones with servers crashing and they’re the ones establishing the criteria for purchasing an iPhone 3G. So yes.. part of the blame for this crazy ordeal does indeed lie with these companies. Now, one can understand why activating the phone in the store was so important to AT&T but there had to be a better way of doing this. When I was purchasing my iPhone 3G, the Apple rep that handled my sale had a simple handheld device that performed nearly all the work. It scanned the barcode on my iPhone 3G box, it dealt with the transaction details, and it checked to see if I was an eligible user etc. I had expected to deal with people behind terminal stations but once I realized people were simply working with these handheld devices, I thought - gee… why couldn’t they just make sure more reps were on hand with more devices? Seriously now - it was clear that the 3rd St. store was not violating any sort of fire laws with the number of people in the store. There could have been 2x the number of people inside and everything would still be fine.

And yes - Apple and AT&T are to blame for their server response times. They had months to prepare their systems for this and in particular, Apple knew that they were launching worldwide.. and hence, they knew damn well that people would be hammering the servers. To top it all off - they also knew that MobileMe would go through a good deal of stress soo.. why didn’t they prepare better for this? That’s just not acceptable.

Apple in particular should also be blamed for the way they organized the lines for the iPhone 3G. Let’s face it - putting everyone in one single long line just wasn’t the best way to sort the consumers out. If Apple knew that existing iPhone users would have an easier time in purchasing the phone, they should have separated those users out. For a company that prides itself in the user experience, they severely blew it with the launch. There’s nothing smart about putting everyone in a single line. My recommendation to Apple - divide the lines into three lines. One line for existing iPhone customers. One line for AT&T customers without the iPhone. One line for all new customers. Each line has a different wait time and this helps set up the overall expectations for the consumer.

Finally, we the consumers also had some blame to share for this - I know I was partly to blame for a long line. Come on now… let’s face it.. did I really need a new iPhone 3G on day one or day two of the product line? OK.. actually it would help if I had the new model because it allows me to crank out a review earlier to all of you. But I digress now. By waiting in line.. by spending an inordinate amount of time in the Apple store, we the consumer also made life hard for others who simply wanted the phone. If you walked into the Apple store and did not know what wireless plan you wanted nor did you know if you really wanted an iPhone 3G, then shame on you. You had plenty of time to do research and you had plenty of time to ponder on what the iPhone 3G was all about.

Yet.. ultimately, most of the blame goes to Apple for setting up these crazy expectations. The company helped fan the flame for these mobile phones and they certainly knew the product launch would be a big thing. So while I can put some of the blame on the consumers, most of the backlash really is indeed on Apple and AT&T. In many ways, this should be a case study on how NOT to launch a new product.

At the end of it all, I have the iPhone 3G finally and life is.. still the same.

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