After 12 hours and 8 minutes, I finally had my order confirmation for my new iPhone 4 in my inbox on the evening of June 15th.
When I woke up at quarter of 6 Tuesday morning, I truly wasn't expecting the Apple Store to be up and ready to take iPhone 4 pre-orders. Here on the east coast, usually "new product Tuesdays" start with the Apple Store going down around 5-6am and then coming back up around 8-9am. This Tuesday however, Apple got a head start.
I completely expected the experience to be just as it was a year ago. When I pre-ordered my iPhone 3GS, it literally took 3 minutes from start to email confirmation. This year I would try about 4 DOZEN times throughout the day to place my pre-order for iPhone 4.
Everyone knows the story by now. Apple announced that they had more than 600,000 iPhone 4 pre-orders on Tuesday and apologized for order delays, time outs and server down times on behalf of themselves and AT&T. I suspect the majority of the blame should go to AT&T (as usual). The first coupe of steps on the Apple Store were fast and easy, but after the "new or existing customer" screen, the next step was to give my phone number, zip code and last 4 digits of my social security number. Then it would jump onto AT&T's servers to grab your account information. The majority of the time, that's when things shit the bed for me and I would start over.
The Apple Store iPhone app that Apple released earlier that day didn't help either. Most of the time, the app would completely crash after I put in my credentials for an existing customer. Then later on in the day, it would quickly jump to a screen where you could reserve one at a local brick and mortar Apple Store.
Around 6pm Tuesday I finally made it to the shopping cart only to find 3 other iPhones in the cart. I deleted all the old ones and completed my purchase information. About 45 minutes later I received the confirmation email form Apple.
Just in time too. Wednesday morning I check my RSS and Twitter feeds and it seems that the iPhone 4 pre-orders had slipped to a July 2nd shipping date. Then later on that afternoon, they slipped again to mid July.
I've read many theories as to why there were 10 times the pre-orders this year compared to last year. The one I believe the most is this year, AT&T gave an early upgrade to customers who purchased an iPhone 3GS 12 months ago instead of the standard 18 months. Last year, customers like me who wanted to upgrade to the 3GS had to fork over $399 (for 16GB) for the privilege. This year, it was $199 (plus an $18 upgrade fee).
Unfortunately, unlike last year, I wasn't able to have the iPhone 4 shipped to my work address where I will be during the day. AT&T would only ship to my billing address (home). So I did the only thing a loyal Apple customer would do. I took the whole day off.