“Shoppers snatched up about 525,000 of the devices at Apple and AT&T stores from Friday’s launch through Sunday, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research in San Francisco,” Josh Friedman and Ronald D. White report for The LA Times.
Friedman and White report, “A ‘small percentage’ of customers experienced problems activating the devices, said spokesman Mark Siegel of AT&T Inc. ‘Our first priority is to get them up and rolling as quickly as we can,’ Siegel said. He said the problems were minimal, considering the ‘revolutionary’ device and a new activation process.”
“Half of the Apple stores on the West Coast sold out of the devices on the first day, Chowdhry estimated,” Friedman and White report. “AT&T declined to comment on the availability of the device or sales totals, but according to news reports most of its 1,800 stores ran out of stock by Saturday.”
As for the activation issues, “Chowdhry said AT&T apparently had insufficient technical support staff on hand because it hadn’t prepared for such heavy demand. ‘The load was more than the system was designed to handle,’ Chowdhry said,” Friedman and White report.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mike R.” for the heads up.]
No problem here – 10 minutes activation and a lifetime of bliss.
Then why is the stock down in premarket?
iBrick my ass. Thanks for the headline MDN. You turds.
Got mine activated within hours after purchase, but they are having alot of issues transfering existing numbers from other carriers. I still can’t recieve calls on iphone.
The market opens at 10:00 EST go AAPL!
If it just sits there unusable, it is an iBrick until AT&T gets around to doing their job. I paid a $36 activation fee – it took 31 hours and 22 minutes for my iPhone to be activated. I deserve a refund!
Thank you, MDN, for sticking up for the users and explaining the problem so early – it made my weekend with my iBrick better than it would have been.
It’s not MDN’s job to defend Apple.
The iBrick is NOT FUD. It took me until Sunday to activate, and I was a current subscriber. It was probably the most frustrated I’ve been over an Apple product, and I’ve owned them all. I blame ATT for terrible lack of foresight on this. How they can even claim they didn;t expect this is intolerable. And Apple looks bad over it. And that angers me because I’m a shareholder and fanboi.
Nothing worse than spending Friday in line and then spending the next 43 hours looking at what is probably the most beautiful piece of engineering ever made and not being able to use it. ATT is crap.
not ready
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53 hours of waiting from when I first started until the completed it finally around 11pm yesterday
@Mama
Buy the rumours – sell the news
“It’s not MDN’s job to defend Apple.”
And it’s not Apple’s job to do AT&T’s work you muppet.
Who cares if it takes 10 min or 10 hrs,
After waiting in line since 4am, most people should start activation and go to sleep anyway. Then when they wake up, voila.
Mine took 36 hours to activate with at least 7 hours on the phone with AT&T (persistance is rewarded with activation). My phone now works well, except visual voicemail does not work (I am not the only one experiencing this problem). I spent 4 1/2 hours on the phone last night with AT&T trying to figure out how to get the VVM to work. We finally gave up because we were all literally exhausted. I called back this morning and the woman at AT&T finally had a clue … there was a check box on her system that says “Visual Voice Mail” that was unchecked, but it was grayed out so she couldn’t figure out how to enable it. Their engineers now have the issue and we will see if they can figure it out.
if your billing zipcode, is diffferent than your cell’s zip, you’re going to have a delay. It’s that simple.
As they say, patience is a virtue but impatience is usually understandable. We’ve all been waiting for months, though, so a few extra days isn’t so big of a deal.
As for premarket trading — it’s crap. Only traders are affecting the price premarket; what matters is what the investors think, and they’ll show up in a few minutes.
so nobody is going to talk about the 525,000 estimate, just AT&T and the ball they dropped?
MW: you are only seeing a very small part of the “picture”
You where all preselected. Chosen ones…To make sure Steve had a ‘predetermined excuse’ that would distract everyone from shortcomings that might pop up.
It’s very easy. You create a problem that you can manage, (similar to battery-life, screen-scratches), make sure that people have something to report,…and voila: Nobody talks about anything else. Great, another marketing marvel that will get into 101 for product-launches….
Oh, of course it was also to give you guys a bit of a flashback on ‘Vista-feeling’….
And yes, I’m a fanboy, and yes, I have to wait for at least a year to even hold it in my hands here in Thailand….
500,000 iPhones are going to be all over the country this week.
At least 10 people will get some hands on time with each one.
After they do nearly 5 Million more people will want one within this week on top of those that already do, but can’t get one because they are sold out.
AT & T better get its act together.
The 525,000 number is just a guess. Wait for Apple and/or AT&T to give the real number. There are strong indicators — statements from AT&T and Apple personnel working with customers whose activations failed — that the real number is over 1 million!
if your billing zipcode, is diffferent than your cell’s zip, you’re going to have a delay. It’s that simple.
Read this article for a solution which appears to have not been disseminated with any degree of efficiency by AT&T.
Anyone who knows anyone with this problem should pass them this link.
@lnuts,
Actually, the NYSE opens at 9:30 AM EDT and closes at 4:00 PM EDT.
Bought my wife’s iPhone at 6:30 p.m. on Friday. After having to do a 136 MB OS X update and 36 MB iTunes update (which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that my job has DSL) I went through the activation process and reached the “Your activation will take additional time screen” somewhere around 7:40 p.m., with the initial email coming stating more time was needed at 7:48 p.m. on Friday.
iPhone was not activated until 4:30 a.m. this morning–so around a 56 hour activation time.
Worse was that mine was activated Saturday night, even though hers was registered first and is just another number on the same account.
You can imagine how happy she was over the weekend.
I can’t wait until the iPhone goes to T-Mobile. AT&T reception in my area, and where my kid goes to college, is horrible.
I wonder how major investors in Verizon are treating that company’s stock today?
I…
Went to my local (Clarendon) store at 6:30 Friday. 200 people in line. 7:30 I returned to the store, line gone. Bought my iPhone. Went home, and because I had a Verizon # I had to wait 2.5 hours to finally activate the phone. Stayed up til 1am syncing, creating playlists, converting video, and sending Apple feedback on the couple minor things I think need to be fixed with the first iPhone software update.
8:30am Saturday morning pulled my iPhone off the dock. Rode up to a motorcycle rally in Philadelphia with the rally agenda and meeting points all bookmarked. Listened to my music on the way up. Shortly after arriving I received a text message saying that all calls to my number would now go to my iPhone. Used the iPhone’s camera to take all of my event pix. Showed off my new toy to everyone. Laughed at the my friend who paid his daughter to stand in line at the Columbia Mall Store.
At 12:30am after spending the whole day showing off the phone to everyone the phone died. Discovered that my friend’s iPod charger (4g) would not charge his phone, but that my iPod charger (3g Fire Wire) would easily charge the phone (albeit probably more slowly than we’d’ve liked).
Sunday morning I had a full-charge. Woke up at 7am, watched a video until everyone was up. I wish there was a brightness control on the video. Showed more people my toy at breakfast. Many were amazed. Especially the gentleman who realized that an iPhone would mean he could travel with one device instead of phone, camera, iPod, and laptop.
Rode home enjoying the iPod functions the whole way. Uploaded my iPhone pix to the web (you must unlock the phone for iPhoto to import your pix). Decided that the CameraRaw format sucks because it does not make things simple.
MDN Magic Word: “ten” I have a 10am meeting with a client who wants to see my iPhone.
Go to this Apple site to check on availability. You can check by state and city. You’ll see most Apple stores are out. http://www.apple.com/retail/iphone/