This afternoon I embarked on a trip to the Apple store at Towson Town Center to pick up my reserved iPhone4, armed with a decent snack and a book. From the tweets I’d seen, it looked like I would be in for a long wait. The most challenging part of the whole process was finding the correct line, but after a few moments of wide-eyed wandering around the fourth floor of the mall, I found my place at the end of a long line of nerds. And I, I am the nerds.
The Apple store, glimmering on the horizon. This is where the line started. Or, rather, ended.
There was some impressive enterprising behavior happening. Behind me was a guy who, with a buddy, was buying up people’s 3GS phones to hack for TMobile. They were paying between $200 – $300 per phone. I can only imagine what they were making on them. Every five minutes or so, a cart rolled by from Chik-Fil-A, distributing free drinks and sandwiches. A sales guy from Best Buy mobile made his way through the line with a basket of iPhone4 cases and accessories his store was selling. There was also this kiosk, right below where I was in line.
View of the kiosk on the floor below, looking down from where I was waiting in line.
Between noticing enterprising behaviors, I read Karma and Chaos, which felt like an appropriate balance to the absurdly consumerist behavior in which I was participating.
I have to hand it to Apple, given the number of people in line, it moved fast. They had employees moving through the line checking everyone’s reservations in their system, so no one spent hours waiting only to be denied. Once I got into the store, it was loud as a night club, but the service was terrific and fast (except for the times when AT&T’s system hung). From getting inline to phone in hand, it was about an hour and twenty minutes. Not bad, considering that when I went down to the Best Buy Mobile to buy a case (the enterprising behavior, it worked!), the guy who walked in at the same time had been in line for eleven hours.
Setting it all up.
So far I am thrilled with it. The display is gorgeous, it’s fast, and the quality of the camera is really, really good. Of course, it occurs to me that although I have been futzing with it all evening, the one thing I have yet to do is use it to make a phone call.
But really, who does that anymore?
I’m not going to post a ton of pics of the phone – you can find those anywhere. But, what you can not find anywhere is a twenty second video shot and edited on a brand new iPhone4, of a dachshund licking peanut butter off his nose.
