To sum up my experience in 2 words – it sucked!!! I could end the post there, but my editors wouldn’t be very happy with a one line article so let me elaborate.
Being the realist that I am, I understand that there are people all over the globe trying to do exactly the same thing that I am today, and that is place our pre-order for the fancy new iPhone 4 that was recently unveiled at WWDC.
My experience started with a Twitter agent I follow (@AppleStoreCheck), showing that the online Apple Store was going down then coming back up multiple times throughout the late evening and early morning. That’s somewhat understandable as the online store needs to be updated with all the new information.
Now, since the page has been up I’ve been literally stuck on the https://buyiphone.apple.com webpage–since the damn thing is frozen after I key in the information that I want to replace an existing phone on my account with the new iPhone. Strike 1!
In an effort to be different this go around I wanted to go with the 16GB white model, but to my surprise that option is not available today (see graphic below):
I’m not happy about that, thus Strike 2!
After a few more hiccups and frozen screen incidents I have finally been able to change my choice from white to black, and get past the initial order screen. I proceed to type in my existing phone number, and specifics of the account I want to update and get presented with the following message:
Needless to say, I’m not very happy, and that is Strike 3!
Who is to blame here? Is it Apple or AT&T? I’m going to push the burden to AT&T since it’s their back-end systems that the webpage is tying into. They’ve already made the internal announcement that no one on the retail side is allowed to take vacation or time off during the month of June. This isn’t the first time they’ve gone through a major launch from Apple so you’d think the internal ordering systems would be beefed up enough to handle the influx of order requests.
Obviously I’ll try again, and again, and again until I am able to get my pre-order in since I’m a loyal subject of all things Apple, but the user experience thus far has not been very cool. In fact, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, VP of Product at SimpleGeo had the best tweet this morning.
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