My 3G experience on 7/11

[Ramesh]

So here's my story, if you're interested.

I got to the Apple store at 6:00 am. They handed out water, coffee, doughnuts, ice cream, Popsicles, and t-shirts. It was pretty cool. The waiting sucked. With the servers going down, the first person didn't leave until after 9am. I was the 110th person in line, with the first person in line being there from 4pm on the 10th of July. By the time I got to the door, there was an addition 250-300 people in line.

Fast forward a little bit, and I didn't leave until 1pm! I was able to purchase my 16GB white iPhone, after a solid 7 hours. Purchasing and activating only took about 10 minutes. As I'm leaving the mall, I unknowingly crossed a double yellow line in the road to go left. A cop pulled me over and gave me a ticket!

The battery sucked yesterday since it wasn't on a full charge, so today will be the first day of use. We'll see how it goes. 3G has been worth it to me, and the GPS was used already.

All in all - it was worth the wait... for me.

BTW - I went back to store at 9 (well, the mall at least) and the line was still huge. However, the wait time was down to 3 hours from the end of the line, since the rest of the country had quit activating by then.

So that was my experience. What was yours?

[patrickj]

Nice recap Ramesh. Ticket part is suckerama, sorry to hear that mate!

You guys got the Fist Class treatment on the refreshments it sounds like. My day was horrendous, but mainly through my own fault. Short story is I had a good original plan in terms of what time to get to a smaller AT&T store in the morning and such, but failed to stick to it - and oh boy did it cost me! Total time in line between AT&T (where I missed the cut for getting a phone by two people) and then at a mall Apple store = 12.5 hours.

At the end I got a 3G (and in the size / color I wanted) and got activated in store without hassles, so still all worthwhile, but wow, exhausting day.

Oh, and one other major silver lining and a Big Advert for how cool Austin is - had loads of super cool, friendly people all around me in both lines - made the huge blocks of time pass by so much more quickly coz we were chatting and laughing so much of the time.

I wrote up a little more on this here too ...

[michael180]

I live in the Monterey Bay area of northern California. I was able to get into the Apple store by 10 AM. As I waited I kept checking out both the Black and White models. And as I got closer and closer, I began to have second thoughts. The phone just looked cheap to me. I decided to keep my V1, with my jailbroken 1.1.4., and just walked away. People couldn't believe it.

After reading the posts here, I now wonder if I made the right decision? It just didn't feel right. Maybe when we can jailbreak 2.0. Plus we can't get 3G here yet.

That's my story.

[Ramesh]

Oh - and I recruited 3 new members and 1 apple employee. Hopefully they join. They all said the would and at least check us out.

[mlass]

After camping out 16 hours last year and being number 1 in line I got a little more info from my store this year. I knew they had 70 phones and no lines had formed by 10PM, so I hit the Bar untill 2am.

I got to the store about 4am with about 10 people in front of me. A little after 8am I got in the door. It took a couple of minutes to activate my first phone and we noticed that every Sales Rep was having trouble, so they told everybody to just take them home.

I got home around 8:30am and couldn't download iTunes 7.7, so i went to sleep. Got up at 2pm and activated my other phone in seconds and downloaded iTunes 7.7.

[bls8195]

I got to my AT&T store at 1:15AM of July 11th, and was number 8 in line, doors, open right at 8AM got right in as they only allowed the number of people as reps were to help, so 15 people at a time got in, I was probaly in there for 15 minutes and was gone, activation did not go as planned, but still was able to get in and get the phone and partly active, and then had to finish when i got home, but by 7am there was about 200 people in line, and the store was saying they only had about 100 phones. I got the 16gb in white, so I was happy.

[Kage]

I got up around 9~10 AM to find out the cable and internet was out and a power cable was dangling in the street, so I decided I should go out to see if the AT&T store here had any of the new iPhones. I get there and ask the lady inside if they have any and they say they are all sold out and won't be getting anymore for another 7-10 days, so I call Apple (used the map on my old iPhone to get the number ) and they tell me they have a ton in stock, so I head out there and get there by 12 something to find out the line is wrapped all the way around the store.

I figure since the cable and internet is out at home I can just spend the next few hours waiting in line to upgrade my iPhone, so I pull out my headphones and listen to a cd, after the cd is done we have moved maybe 10 feet from where I started and then the guys in front of me started talking about how they went to the AT&T store and were the 42nd in line when they only had 40 iPhones. The two ladies infront of them pull out their iPhones (which were in the baddest condition I've ever seen with one having some of the glass missing in the upper left corner and the other one having its screen cracked).

Well I've listened to two albums at this point and finally moved around from the back of the Apple to store to the side. A few more albums later and I'm up at the front maybe with 20~25 people waiting in front of me to go in. So we move a couple of feet every 5~10 minutes and then for some reason one of the guys waiting in front of me calls it quits and leaves after at least 5 hours of waiting in line (:O). Well we move closer to the front and my iPhone dies on me () but it doesn't matter as I'm about to go inside.

Me and the two people behind me are allowed to go inside the store finally and they ask us questions like 'Are you an AT&T customer?" "Are you eligible for an upgrade?" etc. before we finally get to the point where they hand us a brand new 16GB Black iPhone () and we are going through the process of buying it. Its all good until we get an IRU error because I had just signed up for a discount after reading about it here through my university, so we call 611 on my phone (they let me charge it in store) and are put on hold for about 10 minutes before a customer service rep picks up. I tell him about the problem we ran into and he suggests two things: 1) Leave the Apple store and wait the 7-10 days to go to the AT&T store as they can simply bypass this error while Apple stores cannot; and 2) Buy the new phone but get a new line and then go over to the apple store and have them move the old number to the new number but it may take an hour or so to get done.

So after waiting in line that long there was no way I'd just give up and head home with no new iPhone, so I bought the phone and walked out with my old number and a brand new number for the 3G iPhone and headed over to AT&T again. I tell the guy what happened and what the AT&T rep told me and he goes to talk to his manager and comes back to tell me the bad news and that's I can't move my old number without paying a $175 cancellation fee and what the AT&T guy told me to do shouldn't have been followed as they can't do such a thing. After he talked to his manager some more, his manager talked to the manager at the Apple store and then the AT&T workers told me I have to take my 3G iPhone back and return it to Apple, then rebuy it and upgrade my old iPhone to get the new number on it.

Well they have me call AT&T customer service and I'm on hold for another 10 minutes or so and then I tell them I want to cancel all discounts on my old iPhone, she says its been done however there wasn't a way I could check to see if it actually had been done. So I go back out to the Apple store (the line is still as long as before) and head inside and talk to one of the guys working in the back who helps us out. He tells us "Why would AT&T send you back here when we just make the phones and they are the network," but assures us that one way or another they will have this problem fixed. So after he talks to his manager and the AT&T mananger over the phone explaining the situation, maybe around 9:40 PM or so we begin the return process of my 3G iPhone.

By now they have moved the line inside the store and after a couple minutes we get the return done and he has me check on the AT&T site to see if I'm eligible for an upgrade and says it should work this time however I can wait 24 hours for the cancellation to go through or go ahead and do it but I might end up with two iPhones once again. So I go ahead and do it and after giving him my info again the 'check status' screen seemed like it had been frozen for 4~5 minutes but it works this time and says I'm eligible for the upgrade. I ended up leaving around 10 something from the Apple store with my old iPhone number succesfully moved to a new 3G iPhone (I had to purchase a new one from them).

[sonicwind]

so you waited in line for 7 hours so your web page downloads would be 30 seconds faster? Um... That's a lot of web page downloads to be worth it in the long run.

[Ramesh]

Originally Posted by sonicwind

so you waited in line for 7 hours so your web page downloads would be 30 seconds faster? Um... That's a lot of web page downloads to be worth it in the long run.

I'm not going to even form a rebuttal for that. It's worth it for me. End of story.

[Ramesh]

BTW - after my first day of use, the battery is killer. It kinda sucks. This is the first time I have had to charge before going to bed. That's not going to work for me...