For those who know me, and as other articles on my blog will reveal, I’m not a fan of Apple products. However, since we needed an iPhone 6 for the business for development and testing, I chose to stay up until midnight Friday morning to pre-order the phone, against my better judgement. It turned out to be both a frustrating and entertaining experience, all at the same time.
As I should have expected, the Apple site was completely inoperable from 11:30PM Thursday night on. After wearing out the F5 button (browser refresh) on my computer by 12:15AM, I decided to head over to the only true source of news on the Internet, Twitter. In addition to finding out I wasn’t alone in my frustration, I was also entertained. Here are a couple of the better tweets that I remember:
“The good news, the Apple TV crew is no longer in charge of the live stream. Bad news, they’ve taken over the website”
“The only thing that would make this better is if they added a woman’s voice to the website speaking in Chinese saying We’ll be right back”
“I now know how to say ‘We’ll be right back’ in 30 languages, thanks Apple!”
“Maybe the trick is you have to listen to the entire U2 album before Apple will let you order the iPhone 6”
There were so many more that I wish I would’ve written them all down.
It seemed as though people were having some luck with the AT&T and Verizon websites, but those sites went into melt down mode around 12:30AM. When that happened, even more hilarity ensued on Twitter. I’ve never seen so many people that upset about not being able to give their money away since my parents waited in line to buy a Cabbage Patch doll for my sister in the eighties.
I persevered until 1AM, and then decided to go to bed. As bad as we needed the phone for development, it wasn’t worth staying up any later.
Somehow I found the energy to wake up at 6:30AM to head to the gym and figured I’d give the site one more try before leaving the house. I got into to the Apple website on the first try. We’re supposed to have an iPhone 6 at the office by the 19th, provided all goes according to plan.
Lesson learned: for the next iPhone launch, don’t stay up expecting to order an iPhone. Instead load up Twitter, sit back, and expect to be entertained!