I had a 9am meeting this morning so I was not able to be one of the first in line for the iPhone. That didn’t stop me from at least checking out the festivities. Here are pictures from the Apple Store in the Green Hills Mall and the AT&T store in Green Hills:
After talking to the people I knew in line at the Apple Store and talking to some random people in the AT&T store I went off to my meeting. Because I needed to buy 3 iPhones I had to go pick up a couple of my kids so that I would have 3 people for the “1 iPhone per person” limit. Since my kids were in East Nashville I went to the AT&T store in Rivergate. Once I got there I learned that they were sold out. They played dumb receiving future shipments.
After leaving the Revergate store I called the Green Hills AT&T store. They still had inventory.
It turns out that the AT&T store in Green Hills made the executive decision to go ahead and sell tomorrow’s inventory today. That allowed me to buy the three phones I needed.
Note: there are plenty of iPhones at the Apple Store. However, I have a business AT&T account so I had to use an AT&T store.
AT&T was not able to activate my phones. This meant 3 things:
- I did not get to “bond with my iPhone” in the store.
- I would have to activate my iPhones at home using iTunes (which was producing horror stories on twitter).
- I was going to walk out of the AT&T store with a dead blackberry and three unopened, shrink-wrapped iPhones.
The whole point of activating in the store was to prevent people from leaving with pristine iPhones that could be sold on the open market. Activation through iTunes was also supposed to be required, but it wasn’t. I activated my AT&T account by putting my iPhone SIM card in my Blackberry. Then I put the SIM back in my iPhone later and hooked it into iTunes. By hitting cancel on all the iTunes prompts I was able to un-brick my iPhones without going through the recommended procedure. I could have then jailbroken the phones, unlocked them, and sold them on eBay.
Seems like all of the headache this morning didn’t really result in much more security. Apple and AT&T could have sold more phones without requiring activation in the store (and I could have still sold unlocked iPhones even with their precautions).
Add in all of the troubles that people had getting their iPhones activated using the proper method, it seems like Apple and AT&T over-thought this problem. Oh well.
Now I am sitting down and playing with my new iPhone. It is pretty sweet. The App Store is the killer app.
