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Some Days, You Just Can’t Buy an iPhone
By Dave Peterson | July 14, 2008
The story of my quest for an iPhone 3G begins back on the day of Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC, during which July 11 was announced as the on-sale date for the phone. That afternoon, Cali Lewis sent out a tweet that suggested everyone in the Dallas-Fort Worth area agree on a common Apple Store at which to congregate, in hopes of recapturing the line party fun of last year’s launch. I read her note and thought, “Yeah, that would be cool, sure wish I could join them.” In such ways are crazy schemes hatched. By the end of my commute home, I had worked out all the details and had fairly well settled that a month later I’d be going to Dallas to stand in an iPhone line with Cali, Neal, and friends.
Fast forwarding to the Big Day, the three of us arrived at NorthPark Mall at about 6:30 AM, and lined up for the wait until 8:00 AM when the Apple Store opened. The line was a fun experience. People chatted, traded geek stories and Apple employees came out and made sure we knew all the rules. There are a lot of rules this year. Last year the rules were, give us money, we’ll give you a phone. This year, there were many more rules, mostly reasonably well publicized prior to the event. In terms of purchase procedures, there seemed to be three major groupings of purchasers: Current iPhone owners, current AT&T customers (with sub-grouping of whether or not the customer was eligible for a handset upgrade), and new AT&T customers. But, there was a new wrinkle mentioned to us in the line that hadn’t been quite as well promoted ahead of time: If you had some sort of corporate discount or subsidy for your existing service plan, you had to buy your iPhone at an AT&T store (a corporately owned one, not a franchise store – still with me?) rather than the Apple Store. None of us felt that described us. No one had offered to pay any part of our phone bills, so we figured we were still on the straight and narrow (although the path seemed to be getting tighter with each passing moment).
By 9:00 AM we were inside the store, and although we were a bit concerned by how many more people had gone into the store than had come out, we felt success within our grasp. It was, however, becoming clear that the best laid-plans of corporate giants were now in full-shambles mode. The idea of in-store activation, to make unlocking and using the phone on networks other than AT&T less likely, had resulted in massive system-wide server overloads. Apple employees starting coming around telling us, “Good news. The plan is being abandoned.” Essentially, people were being told that if they didn’t want to wait for the activation servers to come back to life, they could just take their phones home and activate them on their own.
Finally, it was my turn. I told them what I wanted (black, 16 GB), they pulled it off the shelf, and started taking my account info. The end was in sight! Then the wheels came off. The employee helping me looked with greater and greater puzzlement at the screen of her point-of-sale PDA. I could tell she had something bad to tell me, something she didn’t want to have to put into words.
“Uh, do you have a corporate discount?”
I told her no, but had the sinking feeling that my iPhone was already slipping away. She tried her best to remind me of the fact that I didn’t pay my entire bill and that my company paid part of it, and that was a corporate discount. But there were no memories to shake loose, because I pay my whole iPhone bill, and distinctly remember that no discount was available when I bought my phone. However, the fact that I paid my entire bill myself held no weight against the three-letter code she was seeing next to my name. Nothing to be done, there’d be no Apple Store iPhone for me. There was a small glimmer of hope, though. It was explained to me that there was a corporate AT&T store in NorthPark Mall, and that they would be able to sell me a phone. By now, Cali had her phone (Neal wasn’t actually buying one) and a number of people had joined us with plans to continue on to Buca di Beppo, where we were planning to have lunch afterwards. But first to the AT&T store!
There was a line there too, but it turned out to be a line of people who wanted to get in for other reasons. The store was sold out of iPhones. I got on the phone with AT&T Customer Service, and explained my situation. I asked to have the code removed from my account so that I could go back to the Apple Store and get the phone (which would have entailed standing in a line longer than the one we were in at first – I wasn’t thinking too clearly at this point). The person on the other end explained that if I had the code removed then I would lose my 25% discount and that would be a shame since, I would finally be able to use it now that I was getting an iPhone 3G. This was just strange enough that it stopped me mid-sentence. Here’s the deal: I had a discount on my original iPhone plan, but I couldn’t use it because discounts weren’t allowed on the original iPhone. It was there, but I couldn’t use it, so I never knew it was there. This must make sense to someone, somewhere. But, the new iPhone does allow discounts, so if I didn’t have it stripped away (and could eventually find an iPhone) I’d have a standing 25% discount off my monthly bill. To say I understood all this might be stretching a point, but I did grasp the concept that if I just sat tight, and got an iPhone someplace else and on some other day, I’d have a significant monthly savings.
That’s where I am now. I just got back to Seattle yesterday, and haven’t gotten around to trying to find an AT&T store with the kind of phone I want, but that’s the plan. Everyone who lined up on July 11 has some sort of story, a few people might even have a story of the experience going exactly to corporate plan. With such a twisting, turning, complex plan, however, I suspect most stories are a bit more like mine.
To read about the experience of taking my online friendship with Cali and Neal into the analog world, click here.
Topics: Phones | 1 Comment »
July 16th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Good story. I always wait a little while for any new app etc, let other people iron out the bugs etc first.