A Big Waste of Time

I had put off getting a phone since I’ve been back because I wanted the new iPhone. I figured it would come out in late June as usual. Well it came out this past Thursday… that is if you could get your hands on it.

Not wanting to wait another day longer I decided that I’d wake up early Thursday morning, get to the Mayfair Apple Store at 6 a.m. (an hour before the store opened) and I’d be home playing with it in a couple of hours. How wrong I was. So very wrong. When I arrived I found myself at the back of a very long line. Something like 500 people in front of me. Now what was even worse was that there were two equally long lines, one for preorders and one for everyone else. I was so far back in line that I was outside the mall.

I figured that the line would move fast, that it couldn’t take all that long to sell people phones. Again, I was wrong. So very wrong. After about five hours of waiting I found myself stepping into the mall, with at least another two hours left to go. As I had class in the afternoon I had to ditch. The sad part is that they had more than enough phone to go around, but were just slow processing people. I stopped by after class at around 5 pm only to find two lines of 100 people each waiting for phones. I decided that I had enough of lines for the day and headed home.

So the next day I stop by the mall when they open at 10. Hardly anyone is in the store. I ask if they have any iPhones in stock, to which they do. Ten minutes later I’m out the door with a new iPhone in hand. (Though when I walked past at around 11:15 there was a small line of 10 people waiting to get into the store.)

So the moral of the story when it comes to new Apple products: Just go the next day.