While yours truly didn’t run into any problems buying his new iPhone (besides the local AT&T store only having a ridiculously small number of them in stock), many prospective iPhone shoppers today had a far less pleasant experience. In the course of the morning, AT&T’s activation service, which Apple uses to activate the new phones in their stores ran into major problems. Also, there are issues around the iPhone 2.0 software update, which has been bricking numerous phones during the install process because the iTunes Store is currently down.
Our own experience at the Apple store this morning was perfectly pleasant. Apple only allowed about 20 people at a time into the store and kept the rest of us hydrated and fed with water, coffee, and doughnuts. Once inside, processing the phone upgrade and activating the phone took less than 15 minutes.
During the period where the activation servers were down, the Apple store employees let everybody still buy their phones and had them finalize the activation at home. As it turns out, that might not have been very useful at all, especially if the iPhone servers are still only working intermittently.
According tovarious reports online, these problems weren’t just limited to the US, but pretty much occurred around the globe. Given how widespread these reports about problems are, it would seem that the majority of issues was more due to Apple’s fault than the local carriers’.
