Notes from our experience activating an iPhone 3G at Apple retail - Page 2

anyone think I can just walk into an Apple store to get one tonight?

they were out of stock at ATT this morning

Found out, the hard way, that if you have any sort of corporate discount with AT&T (as many individuals do), Apple CANNOT upgrade your account and you must go to AT&T. Of course, the big problem was that AT&T hardly had any phones and sold out after about 40 people in line...

I can almost guarantee you this in-store activation junk is AT&T's doing, not Apple's. AT&T continues to be the worst partner Apple has ever had.

But in this case, it seems the AT&T end of things - credit check, account, phone number - worked out fine in most places. There were some early reports of hiccups but nothing since 8:30am on the east coast.

The issue is with the Apple iTunes servers activating iPhones for both new owners and upgraders, which I don't think AT&T demanded to have done in-store. Apple called this untethering; this process that can be done from home and Apple did send people home with their new iPhones to do this in many cases. Now we don't know if the iTunes servers were simply overloaded, or if they were having trouble getting the necessary info from the AT&T servers, but since I don't think the upgraders had to go back to AT&T, I'd think this was mostly an Apple problem (even if it was a DOS attack).

I have no interest in defending AT&T, and I like Apple, but I really think this mess was an Apple problem.

Did anyone not expect this?! What were they thinking with the in store activation non-sense. The iPhone has been sold out for months, and all the pint up demand from people who haven't been able to get one + the people who've been waiting for a 3G + the early adopters who now want a new phone are all hitting at once. Everywhere I've been has had lines extending out the mall. They should have just sold it like the first one, allowed people to activate the phone at home and charged people's credit cards the full price of the phone if they don't activate within 10 days. Those who had cash could be the only ones requiring in store activation. What would have been so hard about that? They could have saved a lot of people many hours in line, even with server problems, at least people could have dealt with them later from home instead of at the store. I was hoping to get a 3G phone today because I already sold my 2G one, but no way I'm dealing with all this non-sense. Hopefully things will return to normal soon.

As a precautionary I double checked with an AT&T Mobility mgr in person on Thursday because I am on a family plan with my wife and it's in her name. He told me I would have no problem upgrading to the new iPhone on Friday.

Sure enough I had no problem when I bought mine at the Apple Store at Millenia in Orlando, FL. Just gave my phone number and the last 4-digits of her SS#. They made no announcement about the primary user of the family plan having to be present.

Not sure if I was an existing iPhone user or what but I had not prob's.

Lame? Please tell me which cell phone carriers will allow you to buy subsidized phone and use it on a competitor's network?

I'll wait.

As for home activation, it's still possible. I just did it.

Apple went to in-store activation because of the hackers who were unlocking phones to use on other networks. It wasn't their first choice.

It really depends on who was insisting on the in-store iTunes activation. IMHO, this was mostly Apple's servers getting bogged down ... sending people home to activate in the first place would've lessened this issue considerably. Since it appears Apple wrote the software for at-home activation, I'd tend to think it was AT&T who wanted to do this in-store BS.

I may have related that when I was in Vegas at the end of April, my iPhone was either lost or stolen. I had the option of buying a new one to replace it or waiting for the new model to come out. Well, I thought that I had that option, but all the Apple stores in Vegas were out of stock of the phone, and it didn't even occur to me to check with the AT&T stores.

By the time I got back home, I had pretty much decided to wait until the new phone would be released; I was hoping that Jobs would announce immediate availability when he gave the keynote speech at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference on Jun 9th, but as you all know (unless you were living in a cave), the release date was today. (BTW, my homeowner's insurance reimbursed me for the replacement cost of the phone, including sales tax, minus a $100 deductible.)

I set my alarm for 5 am, figuring to leave the house at six to get on line at the store for the 8 am opening. Because I had got up at four yesterday morning for my run, I wound up napping during the day, and as a result, I woke up at 2 am this morning, and couldn't fall back to sleep. I killed as much time as I could, but when I got too bored with just sitting around, I took off for the store, arriving there at about 5:40 am. That put me 21st in line, outside the mall entrance. I found out that if I had arrived fifteen minutes sooner, I would have been first. After waiting for five minutes, they opened the mall, and we went inside, to wait on line indoors. There were about 25 of us by then.

Almost as soon as we had settled in place, Apple employees came by, distributing bottles of water. And during the next two hours, they served more water, coffee, cookies, and breakfast pastries as well as literature about the phone and service plans.

By the time the store opened at 8 am, the line extended almost all the way back to the mall entrance; I'd guess there were eighty to 100 people on line. When they opened the store, they allowed us in, in groups of twenty. So I was the first person in the second group.

Things were fairly well organized; as we waited for an available salesperson, another one reviewed the phone options and service plans available. I already knew what I wanted, so the review was pro forma in my case, and probably for almost everyone else there as well.

I told the salesperson that I wanted an eight gig model; if I had wanted a sixteen gig, I would have had a choice between a white or black back on the phone; the eight gig comes only in black, which is what I wanted anyway. I also told him my name, my AT&T phone number, and the last four digits of my social security number. There was a glitch in connecting with the AT&T servers because of the volume of contacts, but eventually he got through. Then the second glitch happened; my account was inactive, because I had reported the phone lost or stolen. He had to make a voice call to AT&T to reactivate the account. After that, it was smooth sailing; he connected the phone to a Mac, ran iTunes, and activated the phone itself.

All told, it took me about 45 minutes from the time they opened the store until I was out of there with the new iPhone.

So far, it works great, with the added bells and whistles that the new OS and hardware offer, but I haven't had a chance to check out the 3G service yet because it connects via my WiFi router when I'm in the house.

Well, it would certainly be harder than a hacker canceling a credit card before those 10 days were up. Do you think it would never occur to anyone to do that?

Such a pathetic, luddite process from a forward-thinking company like Apple. Really disappointing to read about all the hassles. Also, I am surprised that Apple couldn't figure out a way to authenticate a person's identity online.

I think I'll stick with my iPhone V1 for now, until it is all sorted out.

Cincinnati, OH

Drove past an AT&T store at 10:15 this morning and saw about 25 lined up outside the store. I planned to skip the morning rush and beat the night rush by hitting the one Apple Store in town around 3:00. I arrived at 3:40 to find a very long line in the mall attended by a number of orange shirted Apple employees who were just standing around casually chatting up the customers. I hadn't heard about the problems until talking to an employee that I know. He reported that the wait was in the 2+ hour range, though had been as long as 5 hours earlier in the day. He seemed pretty sure that phones would not be in short supply which was good news to one guy in line. He'd been 21st in line at a suburban AT&T store only to find out that they had only 20 phones in stock. He was clearly in line and determined to get a phone *today*.

I'll get a phone when there's little to no line; perhaps before midnight tonight or sometime this weekend.

gc

I just got back from buying my iPhone and here was my experience.

I started out at a local AT&T store in Nashua around 6 AM. They were claiming they had 250 iPhones in stock. When the doors opened at 8 AM, they revealed they had 25. Being further back than 25th in line, I headed for the Apple Store in Salem, NH.

By 9:15 AM, I was in line. They announced about an hour later that they had over 600 iPhones in stock and that everyone in line would definitely get one. But there were problems, and it was very clear. They announced AT&T's servers were crashing and that they were unable to get people through the credit check or activate phones. Apparently they fixed the credit checks but not phone activation. After long delays where no one was entering the store, I finally got in around 1:30 PM.

The first thing they told me was that getting pre-approved at an AT&T store with a credit check was basically pointless. They needed to do the credit check again regardless of my reference number. I was able to get through this fine but didn't like the fact that they were sending all of my personal information and my social security number over the air. Then I was told that they were not accepting cash for the iPhone. This confused the heck out of me but I was able to buy a gift card. They told me to get a gift card for $335 ($299 for the 16 GB iPhone, $36 activation fee).

When I went to pay, the only thing that rang up was the iPhone so I had $36 sitting on my gift card unused. Instead of asking for the cash back, I decided to buy a case for the iPhone. There wasn't a large selection at this point and I ended up spending $30 on the case. I think it will be good for now.

After I got home, I synced the iPhone and transferred the apps I had downloaded from the App Store. The phone seems to be working great so I'm happy about that. A long day but this is something I've been looking forward to for a while so I'm glad I went ahead, stood in line, and got the new iPhone.

Here in the UK, the 8GB model I picked up from Carphone Warehouse in the UK was handed over, still in wrapper, to take home and activate. I was upgrading from an existing iPhone contract and I guess once I'd signed up to the new plan, confirmed in store, they didn't care where I actually finished the process with iTunes. One less formality to carry out in-store...

I did report it, actually... And recently got this reponse from the exec. director of media relations:

I am truly sorry you had this problem. We have been very clear that the phone is available strictly on a first-come, first served basis. That is only fair. There is no exclusive waiting list that would give people priority. We will look into this. Again, my apologies.

I guess we'll see if this actually does anything.

I was able to purchase an iPhone today in an AT&T store, but they were long sold out of product. I will contacted when my handset arrives within my place in the queue. I wasn't expecting them to do that. However, I must go into the store to pick it up.

This is their currently policy as they can't check ID on the internet and therefore be unable to correctly verify who is eligible and ineligible. They are obviously trying subdue any grey market iPhones sales that happened with the original iPhone from the US. Whether you like the arrangement or not (I certainly don't) you can't argue that it is a result of our actions from last year.

So has anybody with a corporate discount on their account (it would have been inactive if you had a previous-generation iPhone) tried making a purchase through the Apple Store? I know it has been said that these customers need to go to AT&T but I was wondering if Apple was able to activate them anyway. It was nice to discover that I'll be able to get a corporate discount with the 3G and that would be sufficient to offset the additional costs of the new service.

Of course the AT&T stores are out of the iPhone -- Apple Stores have a number left. Also, I have an Apple gift card I would love to use. Walking into AT&T stores makes me feel dirty and used. \

you mean "strict"

word

My intention was not to be patronizing. Located right at the beginning of the article the grammar error can be rather glaring and unprofessional, and I wasn't sure if that was something AI cared about or not.

CA$H is KING!! Although i do quite a bit with the debit card, i still like my CA$H.


SAME HERE!!

I wonder who mandated the phones be activated in store? I feel that was more AT&T than Apple.

If you remember the original keynote, one of Steve's selling points was that the entire activation process would take place in the comfort of your home.

So, I feel as if AT&T mandated this whole ordeal, which turned out bonkers.

But also, I feel the entire mood was crap today. Remember iPhone 1.0? Everyone was happy, in and out, cheering, showing off there iPhone bags. This whole procedure was just about as fun as getting an aspirin caught in your throat.

Yeah right, so it's everone else's fault except Apple's. Some Apple fans should stop keeping their head in the sand. Tones of people with old iPhones trying to upgrade to 2.0 are having problems -- not only the people with iPhone 3G doing the activation in-store.

THE PROBLEM IS WITH THE APP STORE. So that's nobody else's fault but Apple's.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/11...omment-2406825

What do activation, MobileMe and v2.0 issues have to do with the App Store? That is one service that is working as planned.

Huh? There is no problem with the app store. There were lots of activation and upgrade problems on launch day, and they were cleared up by the evening of launch day.

C'mon guys. You know how to read, don't you? Search for a story about "server problems spoil Apple iPhone 3G launch" on this very site. Educate yourself. It's not too technical, even for Mac users. App store=iTunes. Connecting to it is required for activation.

HEHE I love these foot-in-mouth posts.

•

iTunes is an app for all sorts of things.
• iTunes Store is a web portal to buy all sorts of things that you can use in iTunes or through iTunes with synced devices.
• MobileMe is a web-based service for accessing and storing your personal Mac data as well as syncing between certain types of devices, both Apple and non-Apple.
• App Store is a part of the iTunes Store that has iPhone and iPod Touch applications.
• iTunes activation is the actual process used by AT&T employees to activate iPhones with their servers. If AT&T was trying to activate that many of any other phone on their system the same exact would have happened. The problem is with the servers getting bogged down. The same thing likely happened to MobileMe, though coding issues could also be at fault here as it really hasn't be used by a large number of people (like the current .Mac user for the past month or so) and thre were probably a very large number of new iPhone owners signing up for the 60-day trial to test the sync service out.

As previously stated, the only thing that has has no apparent glitches is the App Store. Perhaps, people who may have been looking for music and video may have decided to look at software instead, most of which is smaller than the average song and much smaller than eve a music video, but I think the most likely reason is that iTunes Store servers have been built up over the years to accommodate for the heavy use after the holidays, even so we did see a slow down right after Xmas n 2007.

PS: Activation of the iPhone is not required for access to iTunes, iTunes Store, or the App Store. I don't even have an iPhone yet and I have downloaded 135 of the free apps to try out.

The iTunes version I used at the Stockton St. Apple Store in San Francisco did not seem to be entirely standard, as I couldn't use the mouse to change the song playing or move the iTunes window. Menus and iPhone activation worked fine, though.

yes there is. and a very good one.

Imagine if you spent 8 or more hours in line to get the phone. you get to spend 30 minutes getting the phone cause of ATT issues (either slow server or some glitch setting on your account that is trying to stop you from upgrade or maybe both). you get all that settled. you have the phone now.

you drive home. you connect the phone. turns out that you unfortunately got a phone with a bad battery. it has no charge. it won't even take a charge.

now you have to drive all way back to the store. find parking which if you are at a mall or decently sized shopping area could be hard on a summer day with the phone release going on. wade through the folks in line to get to a staff member you can explain things to, get into the store and wait for x minutes for an available Mac Genius to comfirm that the phone is dead. Then go through the whole return process and re-ring likely with another call to ATT to have the sales person tell them that you got a dead phone etc so it won't ring up as ineligible etc.

or worse, when you get back to the store you find out that they just sold the last 16 Gig Black unit, which is what you wanted. but had you connected it in the store (where there was someone hopefully watching and checking the process for everyone), you could have been hooked up with someone right away, gotten the phone you wanted etc.

that is the reason Apple doesn't want anyone going home without checking the phone in store.

but it isn't iTunes. not all of it. it's ATT's computers backing up, it's account issues like discounts that weren't properly removed, it's late payments on bills locking accounts and so on.
all of that for some folks makes the whole thing longer. for others, it's a breeze. in and out in 5-10 minutes.

I heard one guy in the middle of the day on Friday say that once he got past all the ATT crap (took about an hour he said), he waited about 2 minutes for a free computer, the genius helped him break the box, showed him out to turn off auto syncing on his itunes so he could pick what he wanted to send to his phone and his son's (they share like a 100 GB collection of music, videos etc with 16 G and 8 G to load). they hooked up the first and then second phones. both connected within seconds and worked fine. The Genius even showed them how to sign up for one of the stores free iphone workshops for the coming days and so on.

and he wasn't the only one that said that the itunes part was a breeze, it was ATT that was the problem.

I suspect that legally she should have been but if you had the last 4 digits of her social and didn't tell them that it was hers and not yours they wouldn't have known.

I do know that if it's a minor, at least in California, without a parent present, the Apple stores were turning them away. I saw it happened twice yesterday morning. before the store opened, a trio of employees walked the line, warned folks about the discount issue etc. I saw one employee stop twice within the first 20 or so people and pointedly ask two young looking customers if they were 18. both said no, and were warned that if they had to have a parent with them and if the parent didn't get there by the time it was the child's turn, they would be sent to the back of the line. Both times, no parent. but what could the store do, it's a legal issue.

you can't really say that now can you.

honestly, if they had sold the phones the way you guys are suggest -- taking a credit card number and making folks pay the difference within X days, or making everyone pay full price and using a credit or whatever, you would have had dozens of folks running home and trying to activate from home at the same time. which very likely would have killed the servers as well.

plus you'd have folks calling ATT to find out why they were getting errors cause they have a discount still reporting on their line or some other issue. At least at the store, you have an error code and someone to make the call and help you deal with ATT,

and then if it turned out you had a dead phone, you'd be running back to try to swap for a new one and having to go


can you blame them with all the unlocking. and apple likely has to help stop that as part of their contract. same as they would for any service they were tied to.

the only thing that perhaps would have made things better is if the sales of the phone were by appointment. they do that personal shopping thing with computers. maybe instead of first come-first serve they should have set up perhaps 4-5 "personal shoppers" at each store and say a week ago, opened up the system for folks to schedule an appointment. go ahead and make it the full hour and then those shoppers would have time for issue or if things were free and clear they could help on the general floor, give the new owner some training on the phone, whatever. and if you weren't there on time, you lose, your appointment is cancelled and you have to rebook (maybe give you a five minute grace but the rules would be clearly stated)

then they would have lessened the number of attempts at each point in time and not had huge lines. folks would know when to be there. and they didn't have to shut down the tech support, training etc. they could have even done a couple of 'new to the iphone' workshops during the day for buyers that either had gotten their phone or had a later in the day appointment.

looking at my local store, friday they were open 8am-10pm officially. so that's 13 hours (cutting off sales with the 9pm appointment). lets say that no sale went over an hour and they had 5 shoppers taking orders. That's 65 sales. sounds shabby, but that's 65 successful sales and happy customers that might come back to the store, might tell their friends, might think about getting a Mac next time the computer needs to be changed. maybe on the first weekend, they go with 10 shoppers each day. even 10 has to be better than the 30-50 folks gunning sales at every store as far as server overloads go.

i spent the last couple of days hanging out at the local mall soaking up the reports from buyers (yes I'm a freak).

what I heard was that no, you can't buy at Apple if there is a discount on your line. and apparently the tag that you are affiliated with a company could still be on your account even though the discount rate is 0. but the Apple rep will call ATT and work with you to get that tag off your account so the sale will go through.

very insightful, c'mon what do you expect after the first iphone situation, i guess it went as good as it could

I walked into a mall around 1pm (an hour after they opened), got in line for about 30 minutes, and had an iPhone in hand and activated 10 minutes later.

Note: They did not remove the handset from the box or activate for me. They told me if I wanted to activate here to plug it to any Mac and activate in iTunes. That liar said it would take 5 seconds, but it really really took about 10.

The display looks fine to me, though I have been without my original iPhone for about 2 weeks now. I hope everyone else's expereice was as smooth as mine.

My only complaint is that AIM is not keeping me logged in, thusly not pushing my new IMs. Is this an AIM or MobileMe issue?

You're just being anal about terminology. People have been using iTunes, iTunes Store, App Store interchangeably. Besides, it's not even the point. The point is that activation needs connecting to an Apple server and that has been the cause of the debacle.

No it doesn't. It connects to AT&T servers. iTunes Activation is just like accessing the iTunes Store in that it create a website within the application creating a secure socket using WebOjects nly instead of accessing the iTunes Store servers it connects to the AT&T's servers.

Even Apple Insider reports the problem was caused by Apple servers. Stop being in a state of denial; get out of your imaginary world where Mr.Jobs is your god. This kind of attitude only gives all Apple fans a bad reputation.

Insults and no source for your claims, I guess we know who has given up on trying to debate intelligently. I'm guessing my grammar and punctuation will be targeted next.

Usually I let it go at that point but I'm dying to know how Apple is responsible for the activations on AT&T's network. Forgive me, but it's quite hard for me to imagine that all my personal account info, including my SSN, is on Apple's iTunes servers and not on AT&T's servers.

Back to the original topic, iTunes v7.7 and the App Store are having no issues. MobileMe, OS X iPhone v2.0 and the AT&T activations are.

Interestingly enough, some 72+ hours after activating iPhone 3G at my local AT&T store, I'm still showing my old plan -- the rep apparently didn't upgrade my contract to the minimum one required with iPhone. I am showing that I have a data plan, though.

I have to change my contract around to a family plan one with more minutes, anyway. I suspect the AT&T rep just wanted to get me out the door.

So far, no issues with my .Mac account moving over to MobileMe -- but I'm not using the "me.com" address, either. I'll stick with the .mac addy as long as I'm able.

How long did it take before you making calls? For me, it was 10 seconds after plugging into iTunes while at the store. As for mac.com, that won't go anywhere it's really just an alias, or me.com is. If anything will go away it's the use of your mac.com address for account access, but even that it's a big deal to maintain.