People Come Out in Droves to Line-up for iPhone on Apple's 'iDay';
Too Early to Tell How History will View/Record June 29th, 2007
| by Joe Leo, Columnist |
iWANT iPHONE: Much to the surprise of everyone, two hours past the World Premiere, Apple still had plenty of iPhones in its bushels as these seemingly "lucky" customers in line find out. [PHOTO: ©2007, J. Leo]
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By this time, it was 7:45p in the evening, three hours after we had started our day covering the iPhone story. For some reason, we expected to find a line still in front of the Apple Store, especially since this location was a "flagship" store and in San Francisco's downtown.
To our surprise, we only found the SFPD as the biggest attraction outside the store, standing guard just in case. That and an NBC11 News van positioned to the left with its satellite uplink extended in the air. Everyone else was inside, getting their filthy hands all over the iPhone. When we finally got our hands on one, that's exactly what we found. Fingerprints, dirt, etc.
The biggest surprise of all, considering that it was almost two hours since their doors had opened and their first iPhone had sold, a walk upstairs to the second level found a small line of people at the Genius Bar, making purchases of??
iPhones!
Thinking that maybe they were buying other things, we took a closer look and asked an employee if they were still on sale. The employee who did not want to be indentified, said yes, so we asked how much they'd sold already. He said he couldn't really say anything and that he really didn't know anything because he was a Genius Bar employee.
The Genius Bar employee opened up a bit and said, "Let's just say this. We don't stay open until 12:00a (midnight) to sell out at 7:00p."
Point well taken, because behind the Genius Bar employees were stacks of iPhones in boxes and they weren't empty displays. Apparently, Apple was using all the manpower they could use, setting up the Genius Bar as point-of-sale access areas where customers could also line up to buy an iPhone. (We found accessories being sold on the other end at The Studio).
Back downstairs, stunned customers kept asking Apple Store employees, who were reminiscent of Wal-Mart greeters, "Where's the line?"
There was no line. And you could still get an iPhone. You could get it from an employee with their Newton style portable "cash registers" (if you don't know what a Newton is, then pretend it's a Palm Pilot), you could line up at the main registers, or you could go upstairs to the Genius Bar.
Amazing. Wonder what it looked like down at the nearest AT&T Store (or was this one a Cingular Wireless store too?) down from Apple?
