“The iPhone 7 is not being released until Friday but the famous queues have already started outside some of the stores worldwide,” Jessica Duncan reports for The Daily Mail. “In Germany and America people are already setting up camps outside the stores on Kurfuerstendamm Boulevard in Berlin, and its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York despite there still being five days until its release.”
“According to Harvard Zhang on Twitter, an intern at Bloomberg News, the first man in the queue has been waiting since August 25 – long before the iPhone 7 was even unveiled and some people are even asking for fees to keep spots in the queue,” Duncan reports. “Would you pay over $3,000 or around £2,500 for a person to hold your spot in the queue?”
Some people would:
iPhone 7 line in NYC. Pls pay $300 for 13th spot+chair, end of queue. Pro line-sitter in 11th said it's a $3K+ job. pic.twitter.com/OVykKC1azU
— Harvard Zhang (@harvardzhang) September 10, 2016
Duncan reports, “There was doubt over whether long lines of people would appear this year following reports sales had peaked and the hype for Apple’s products were fading – but clearly this just isn’t the case.”
Read more and see the photos in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: YKBAID.
So much for a “boring” phone huh?
I’ll never really understand why so many people hate Apple products that they constantly have to criticize them. It’s just their opinion but they think it carries so much weight. Boring or exciting is in the eye of the beholder and nothing more.
I hear there is an equally long queue for the Note 7…………returns.
Can you FEEEEEL The Burn?
Actors hired by Cook to populate the line.
Sad it’s come to that.
Comment hired by Samdung to populate the comments.
Sad it’s come to that.
This has been going on since 2007 well before you were born.
It’s the only thing Samsung can’t copy because they have no stores to mention. I’m going to really enjoy all the hater’s comments about people lining-up for iPhones.
(typical hateful comments)
Apple fanboy douches
Don’t they have jobs?
They need to get a life.
My (any) Android smartphone is better.
They’re all lining up for last year’s tech.
They’re all being overcharged.
They’re paid actors by Apple.
etc, etc, etc…
Microsoft has stores and the only lines that I recall were associated with free concert tickets! I have never seen a line at the Microsoft store in the mall near me. In fact, it is generally pretty deserted. So having stores would not necessarily balance this issue for Samsung. In fact, it would increase the insurance costs for the mall.
There’s an MS store at the Pentagon City Center Mall. Not too far from the MS store, about two floors up, is the Apple Store. The difference between the two is that there are more employees at the MS than there are customers. At the Apple Store, it’s always swamped with customers. Often times, it’s over crowded.
As Samsung hired you to blow out her.
Moron Troll. 😛
I would be tempted to move two of those empty
chairs down the line and put mine in their place. If the sitter gets all huffy, I would challenge them to call the police or do something about it. If he lays a hand on me, he’s not going to get his phone any more, because then I would have a legitimate reason to press charges. You can’t hold an empty spot in line. Sure family’s do this in most cases. It’s still rude. But charging for acces to the space is close to scalping. But an empty place in line is no one in line. The next guy to walk up is he next guy after you and if he doesn’t want to be behind empty space, he does’t have to.
Just a little peeved at this contrived entrepreneurialism.
When I’ve waited in line people have been really friendly. I took an extra two fold up chairs and lent them to people throughout the day. We went on coffee runs for each other.
They would kick you out in a second.
Do you sell your chairs or do you offer them as good will to the people around you? Because there’s a big difference. If I knew there was limited supply, I would feel frustrated a dude was in front of me holding spots for anyone willing to pay them cash. If he gave me 40% of that cash, then I might reconsider, but in general it’s supply and demand / first come first served. He shouldn’t own something like a spot. He did his time by showing up early, but so did everyone else who showed up behind him. I don’t know it doesn’t seem fair or equitable, but at minimum rude.
Look at it this way. If the guy in front of you started charging $100 a person to stand behind them, and they kept on doing it, and there was no chairs, how would you feel? At what point would you say, enough is enough? I say my point is ZERO, chairs or not.
This used to be fun ages ago, now it is just a waste of time. Unless you have time to waste…
Clearly, nobody doing this is doing it for the original reasons (to be the only one with the iPhone for some time). Online orders, plus carrier stores, will be reasonably well stocked, so it is unlikely that majority of those who will show off their iPhones on Saturday will be the people who waited in lines (for days). At this point, the people in lines are mostly the core loyal fans who enjoy the camaraderie and the atmosphere (and who have enough free time for it).
I must say, at this point, these lines provide additional ammunition to fandroids and other haters about the “Apple sheep”, or “sheeple” who line up no matter what.
On a somewhat related subject, I won’t be surprised if Apple went back on their promise and actually does announce first weekend numbers after all. All indicators point to a record one.
There’s no point in releasing weekend numbers. Apple shouldn’t bother because only Wall Street a**holes are going to make a big thing about it. All I want is for Apple to sell a lot of iPhones and I don’t need to know an exact number. Let Wall Street make up their own pessimistic numbers as they usually do. I’ll just be happy to know eventually that all those know-it-all pricks were wrong about iPhone 7 sales being low and the product being underwhelming.
I like those portable tents. However, they look like they’d be heated like a greenhouse in the sun. Is it OK to park a camping rig on the sidewalks of NYC? Just kidding. I should bike over there and join the fun.
I think that Apple should issue numbered tickets to avoid the line, or consider a random lottery for the first few hundred slots. Waiting in line is a waste of time.
Hi KingMel (the real one). I’m going to guess that Apple would not be interested in giving out numbered tickets, etc., because that would mean they’re officially sanctioning the lines. I don’t expect their insurance company etc. would like that. Also, the lines are an important feature of customer-provided marketing for Apple, as demonstrated by the publishing of this article.
Professional… line sitters…
There’s got to be an oxymoron in there somewhere.