Pre-Order iPhone 4
Today, June 14th, was the day to pre-order an iPhone 4. Apple decided to enable ordering during the middle of the night when most people on the East coast were asleep and by the time I woke up at 6 AM, the site was already having issues. I jumped over to the AT&T website and tried to order there, but had similar issues. I spent the morning trying to order from the Apple website with no luck. I even downloaded the Apple Store App and tried to place an order. Around 11 AM I went to the Apple Store at Crabtree Mall in Raleigh and found no indication of preparation of handling in-person iPhone pre-orders. I kinda wandered around the store and tried to figure out who to ask. I finally found an Apple employee to talk to and was told to stand in line at the front of the store with other people wanting to pre-order. I walked out into the mall and found 5 other people standing against the railing. After about 5 minutes an Apple employee came out to get us and took us back into the store and told us to use one of Mac Books on display to pre-order. I thought maybe we were going to get a special ordering page, but were all directed to the Apple store website. I tried to order once and gave up. The people around me were already complaining very loudly while the one employee told everyone to just keep trying. I left and headed back to work.
Apple is expected to ship 2,000,000 iPhone 4s at launch on the 24th. With projections of that many orders, you’d think that Apple and AT&T would have had a solid pre-ordering plan for the iPhone 4. I’m not sure who is to blame, but once issues were occurring Apple and AT&T should have made a statement and gave customers an update on when ordering would be available. If the iPhone 4 pre-ordering process was this bad I can’t imagine how bad things will go on the 24th.
A few other items of note:
- The AT&T site was charging $35 for shipping and not waiving the upgrade fee.
- The ordering process failed at various points.
- While I was in the Apple store I heard an employee tell a woman, “if you want to just surf the web you don’t want an iPad as it wont show flash websites and over 75% of websites use flash.”
- I’m using a launch iPhone, so I’m due to upgrade.
- Why was the white iPhone 4 not available to pre-order?
I hope that Apple or AT%T updates customers on what is happening with the pre-order process soon. With so many other phones catching up, will the iPhone lose customers to other carriers due to ordering issues?
In fact, THE NEXT WEB is reporting that the AT&T store was so broken this morning that some accounts were breached and personal information was exposed. I’ll be adjusting my password today and I hope none of my data was exposed. As the day has gone on, the Apple iPhone 4 pre-order keeps getting worse.
Best Buy is supposedly offering pre-ordering tomorrow (and possibly Radio Shack). It will be interesting to see if the iPhone 4 pre-order failure extends to 3rd party retailers.
View Comments to “Pre-Order iPhone 4”
yeah. I am a bit miffed at the whole thing. How many times have they released one of these bloody things. And seriously… how can they /not/ be prepared for this? It seems to me that the bulk of the issues are coming from AT&T as the process on apple's website seems to be decently speedy. It's when the attempt to confirm eligibility with AT&T that things /start/ to get borked. Shame really.
oh well. I have just taken it as a sign I /really/ do not //need// a new iphone.
#impulsedefeated!
Thanks for the response.
At this point it really doesn't matter if the issue is just with AT&T or not, Apple partnered with them and is just as accountable.
oh… I agree. It just seems like a lot of issues that tend to crop up regarding the iphone seem to be att centric..
I would definitely be curious to see the stats as to how many have actually been able to get through…
I must have tried 100x to get through the process today.
It seems as if the media isn't really giving this the coverage I'd expect..could just be me though.
same here. and yeah… I have checked a number of my regular visiting blog sites.. and there's barely anything about it.. except that people are having issue..
They /finally/ seem to be going through
I tried to order mine on apple website, but it kept asking me to choose a data plan. It is funny as I already have unlimited data for my current smartphone and apple.com does not recognize it. I think I am going to have to wait until the phone is in the stores in order to personally go in to make sure I keep my unlimited data plan.
Noticed the ship date is now July 2nd.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.
Still, can't we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can't order a phone?
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakery
issue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues that
actually matter.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I did too, the only time it worked was when I was actually in the apple store but doing it all online.
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I got lucky, and my order went in successfully at 8am.nnStill, can’t we be glad we live in a society where the greatest problem facing us on a day to day basis is we can’t order a phone?
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.
I totally agree with you. Same can be said for the “Crumb” bakeryrnissue. People are more upset over that than so many other issues thatrnactually matter.