“Many eager U.S. buyers of Apple Inc’s new iPhone left stores on Friday frustrated because their new gadgets did not work due to problems activating service,” Reuters reports.
“A spokesman for AT&T Inc, the sole U.S. carrier for the iPhone, blamed problems synchronizing the phone with Apple’s iTunes online music and software store. Apple representatives had no immediate comment,” Reuters reports.
Reuters reports, “AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said Apple was working to resolve the problem but declined to give a timeframe. ‘That’s a good question for Apple,’ Coe said.”
“Earlier in the day, many customers had left New York stores pleased that it had taken only 15 minutes to activate their new iPhones, which combines a music and video player, cellphone and Web browser,” Reuters reports. “But by mid-afternoon, many were annoyed.”
Full article here.
Because by mid-afternoon in New York, the west coast had come online and bogged down the servers, that’s why. We understand the frustration; after all, ’twas us who first screamed “iBrick!” last year over activation delays. One year wiser, we advise, “patience, padawans.” In fact, we just registered an iPhone 3G via iTunes within the last 5 minutes — from our office, not in-store, like the good old days! Now, the fact that the same thing happened last year, well, naturally, that might lead some to ask, what, if anything, did Apple learn from that fiasco?
Obviously this is not ideal and maybe something more could have been done, but when you have something like this that is in such great demand especially initially you can’t simply cater for a few days excess with endless servers and bandwidth devoted to that demand, which will within a short time be totally redundant thereafter. So far this seems like short term and a relatively minor annoyance in the great scheme of things. If it is still happening after the weekend then it is time to judge.
@spyinthesky,
systems availability isn’t like limiting hardware to increase demand. Most of us complained loudly when ISPs (I use Bell Canada as a recent example) started throttling speeds, with the lie that overall bandwidth can’t meet demands during “peak hours.” Our argument is that we paid for a level of service, if they can’t meet that demand then add capacity!
In Apple’s case, there are ways to increase capacity temporarily. I’m sure Apple did this, but didn’t do enough to handle demand. Apple may have garnered some media attention, but at what cost?
“Apple may have garnered some media attention, but at what cost?”
It’s not good publicity to let the world know you can’t handle a simple software upgrade for a product properly. The same capacity will be needed any other time Apple does an iPhone update, except perhaps given that customers have been bitten twice by Apple they will be very wary of purchasing or upgrading on day one thereby spreading the load.
I doubt that the message Steve wanted to send was that Apple can’t put a solid back end infrastructure together to perform a fairly simple task. Now, if you want to handle 4 million transactions a minute, you can do it, just call IBM not Apple.
I had to work yesterday. Downloaded before going to bed, woke up with 2.0. Works great!
None of you “had” to wait in line. You all chose to wait in line. Again complain to someone that can help your situation, like Apple.
still waiting for my touch to get the update
the uk , always last in line
Apple was unprepared and should be embarrassed for such a poor showing. Of course, after the tsunami of fanbois and first adopters the demand should slow to a trickle and equilibrium restored in the universe – just like MBA.