By all accounts, Apple’s and AT&T’s introduction of the iPhone 3G yesterday did not go smoothly. There appeared to be a perfect storm of product introductions and lack of planning by Apple that ended up causing a number of customers leaving the Apple store less than satisfied with the shopping experience. What caused the problem?
- Lots of pent-up demand
- The simulatneous introduction of iPhone 2.0 software
- The simultaneous introduction of MobileMe
Contrary to what many analysts thought, the demand for this version of the iPhone either met or exceeded that or the previous version. The lines outside of Apple and AT&T stores were at least as long (or longer) than those the accompanied the introduction of the original iPhone last year.
Apple has now opened up the iPhone to outside developers who have now released 100s of new applications that are downloadable directly from an iPhone with the updated 2.0 software. The key issue that in order to update an original iPhone with the new software, the owner had to tie into the Apple servers and re-activate the phone.
Apple has also migrated their so-so .Mac service to the horribly-named MobileMe. There are going to be advantages to this new service when it starts working well, including the ability to automatically push updated contacts and calendar events to whatever devices (computers or iPhones) that subscribe to the service. The problem is they launched the new service on the same day.
So the bottom line is that all these simultaneous events resulted in crashing Apple’s servers so that 1) purchasers of the iPhone 3G were not able to activate their phones, 2) people trying to activate their updated original iPhones were unable to do so, rendering their phones useless, and 3) no one could get onto MobileMe on its launch date. Clearly, heads will roll at Apple over this rather spectacular bit of bad planning.
But this also raises the more interesting question, which is this: “What is wrong with these people?” Why in heck were all these people so desperate to have an iPhone that they would line up for over 24 hours to get one. I’ve got news for you: There will be iPhones next week and next month. And you could walk in and get one without a long line.
BTW, I got my iPhone 3G today. And it’s awesome.