Server problems spoil Apple's iPhone 3G launch - Page 2

one day everything will be perfect.....the grass will be cut a perfect 3/4's of an inch twice a week above your grave!

I would bet even if Apple predicted it would have server issues, they decided not to fix it. It might make first day buyers upset, but it makes a very good news story. Lots of free advertising.

I usually see more launch articles about shortages, server issue, etc then articles about launches with no problems and more than enough product to go around.

Sure this iPhone rollout is bad, but what about AI's grammar mistake?

Mr. H?

I downloaded 2.0 yesterday and no problems at all. This is so typical of any opening of any event, store, or the beginning of a holiday rush. It's not much different than shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Should Apple be omnipotent? I hope not. Should they have re-thought this? I wish. I guess it shows that on one hand the iPhone and Apple's products are a raving success, even though their launch day was not.

wait... what?


the 360 uses a IBM PowerPC setup, it's the PS3 that uses it's own proprietary processor system.

Uh, did Apple announce iPhone 3G specs before it was introduced.

I don't think so.

No, MS maybe has not had that much happen at one.

They just spread it over many years time.

Vista?

If that's the case, you must know that the company has screwed up many other years far worse than this.

Yep. I wonde if it has something to do with "geotagging" and determining your location? (Though I turned "Location Services" OFF and the camera didn't load any faster.

Steve

I agree with that there may have been some poor planning with the release schedule. I work for a utility that recently implemented a new online billing application and we spent months planning and testing and our servers only barely made it through the first 12 hours. We have about 300,000 online customers. Trust me it is very difficult know exactly how your servers/process will hold up under exterme conditions.

So I think screwed up is alittle harsh.

And I bought 2 cubes 5 years ago(used). Have purchased 2 eMacs, 1 iMac, 4 iPods(of various generations), and a MacBook this last January. We have both had 1rst generation iPhones since the end of last summer. Have not had a single issue with any of these products.

Apple just tried to squeeze too much in at once. The 2.0 software should have been available to the legacy crowd first like last week or something. That would have solved the whole issue of today, unless something else is going on that Apple isn't talking about.

We are not talking about the CPU, there are a million other chips on the xbox 360 board.

Read this eetimes article about how Microsoft "tried" to save tens of millions, but actually cost them a billion dollars extra.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=208403010

I am afraid that Apple is following Microsoft's idiotic path.

Jobs needs to make a statement saying something to the effect that they acknowledge the problem and will fix it as soon as possible.

Damage control sooner than later...or else the press, and RIM will have a field day, if they aren't already.

Oh, geez. Using an Apple ][ in grade school because you had to doesn't make you an Apple user. When did you first DECIDE to start using Apple products ... and pay for them? That's the question.

Well put. You bring a statement to the table that most people have not thought about. I've been in your shoes before (not quite the 300,000 online customers) and youre darn right about not expecting the unexpected. Scary as hell not knowing whats going to happen and you are the man or women with all the answers to all the questions you dont know the answers to. Man, so many folks dont get it because they havent been there. I say, just wait a week and life will be back to normal and a lot of folks will be happy with there new iPhone. Again, great post.

Ok, so according to you Apple sucks. Fine, the Windows world is certainly the other option.

I wonder what it is about the activation process that makes it scale so poorly. Of course, any time you get hundreds of thousands of people all trying to do something at once, it will cause issues, but like others, I'm really baffled AT&T and Apple didn't anticipate this.

I wonder if it is something to do with iTunes having to access information in AT&T's databases -- either the systems on AT&T's side can't handle the load, or there is something in the interface between iTunes and the backend systems of AT&T that is broken or unable to scale.

I hope more technical details beyond "too many people hitting the servers!" emerges in the next few days, because there's no sugar-coating what a train wreck this has been. Forcing in-store activation was certainly a major culprit, along with the global launch and having iphone 1.0 users all upgrading at once.

They should have found a way to do this without cutting off people's phone service -- I think that is really what got people steamed. If you can't upgrade right away, fine...but don't let people upgrade in a half-assed way and then lose their phone service. I was able to upgrade to 2.0 this morning, but I lost service for two hours, and my current app sync is broken (I can download apps on the phone, but when I sync with the computer, I get error messages and suddenly the apps don't work any more).

When everything works, it's pretty cool -- watching videos on MLB, playing the new glitzy games, listening to the numerous radio stations...but there is some damage control Apple is going to have to engage in over the next week.

If everyone were having those kind of problems, the phrase "it just works" wouldn't exist. Sounds like you've had some bad luck, but it's hardly fair extrapolate that experience upon the entire company. I've purchased several Macs through the years, 2 iPhones and a slew of routers and gadgets and have NEVER had any problems.

Oh, the horror.

I was thinking the same thing. I guess there will always be "bad apples" at sometime or another (sorry). I've just not had many problems with my Apple products. And they have been much more stable that the other platform that I have used.

(Excuse me waiter, can I get another cool aid, thanks). Just kidding. I prefer Scotch.

Yet, once again Apple has underestimated the success of it's products. Almost every product launch is soured by underestimation, whether it's running out of a product too soon, or their servers are overloaded because of the launch of the iTunes Music store, or something else.

You would think that they had learned by now.

I am a loyal apple customer, and always have been encouraging people to pay attention to how well -thought out apple executes product unveilings and launches.

I bet Steve Jobs has like an elitist attitude about how dominant his products are to his competitors, but with this nightmare on their hands, i wish i could just be a fly on the wall at cupertino right now.

I bet apple managers and executives are freaking out and probably feel like a bomb just went off and there is panic and chaos and looting happening @ apple. hahaha nobody is invincible, not even apple

That is not Apple's style at all. They don't choose negative advertising. The impression is that Apple servers and apple server software is not up to par. It looks un-professional. If Apple really is trying to get a foothold in the enterprise world this looks pretty bad, both from a management pov and from a software, hardware pov. If they knew this would happen they would have staggered the event, somehow.

Imagine what we would have said if this was Microsoft? I think all these problems have to do with Apple's recent growth. This is much bigger scale than what they are used to. This has affected a LOT of people. It will all be sorted but I doubt we'll see a similar kind of event. Too ambitious. Jobs loves the big bang type launches and I am sure he is well and truly pissed.

Perhaps something along the lines of "Hey, about that whole trying to launch the most desired piece of consumer electronics in the world while simultaneously updating it's older brother and it's nearest cousins with software in the same vein and also relaunching our email/calendar/online storage services in one fell swoop..."

"Sorry. Hope you guys are diggin' it now. Cheers."

My iPhone 2.0 installation has prgressed sucessfully including activating, so the problems must be alleviated now. Good luck to the rest of you!

Interesting. Apple's support forum page for iPhone just went offline. did it crash or did Apple pull it because of bad press?

MobileMe issues, v2.0 issues, activation issues... geez! I understand that there is a lot going on but Apple seems to more an more frequently fail to give itself any breathing room.

Well, if I was y'all I wouldn't be too angry and annoyed over Apple about this. Knowing how Steve Jobs reacts to incompetence by his staff he is probably chopping the heads of those at fault right this second. Flames are probably coming out of his nostrils and all! \

Tried it at 5:30pm ET and I got right in and activated the 2G phone.

It appears the traffic has eased or they (apple) threw some more servers/bandwidth at
the day long problem....

Bob

there's still about 250 people in line outside the downtown SF Apple store ... what patience. me, i'll wait until 12 am tonight PDT to try to upgrade my 2G. should have slowed down by then.

Well thank you for your kind comment, here is list of some personal computers I've owned:
1980: Apple IIe
1981: ZX-81
1982: C-64
1985: Fat Mac 512KB (I still have it)
1988: C-128
1990: C-Amiga 1000
1991: Macintosh II ci
1993: Macintosh PowerBook Duo (I still have it)
1994: Macintosh Quadra 840
2000: PowerBook G3 Pismo
2002: PowerMac G4 Quicksilver (I still have it)
2004: PowerBook 12" G4 (I still have it)

Installed 4x OS 8&9 Servers, 4x OSX Servers (v.10.1 to 10.4), 5x Windows NT&2003 Servers, 3x Linux Web Servers.

A little more than grade school wouldn't you say?

Apple really didn't impress me today. First, I walk into the ATT store to purchase an iPhone, and the retail rep. tells me they are all out of phones. He told me there were 200 people on line at 8:00am and that they soon ran out of supply.

Are you kidding me? ATT and Apple couldn't anticipate the need for more units on opening day? What the F is that? They only had 200 or so units in stock for the store I went to? Unbelievable that Apple and ATT would not accommodate the obvious rush of people who will want to buy it on day one.

Then, after learning ATT was out of stock at that store, I proceeded to begin the process of making my purchase with a ship date to be received at that same ATT store the following week. I pull out my cash, and the clerk tells me "no cash." "You must use a credit card!"

What the F? I have to use a credit card! I can't buy it cash. That's f&%*ing bull$#!t. They wouldn't even take the $100 ATT Debit card I received from ATT.

Then, I get home to read online that Apples servers are all crashed, and people can't activate their new phones, and the people with the old phones are all off line.

I'll blame this primarily on Apple. They really F'd this up. Their overly managed control of this entire roll out is a cluster F. It's as if Apple thinks they are king of the world and they must over-micromanage everything, to the point of screwing it all up.

I'm very disappointed with my entire iPhone experience. Apple has over managed everything and really made it inconvenient for the consumer in every way. From the $199.00 upgrade restrictions to their inconsideration of the effects on their first generation iPhone users.

Wow!

John Blenio
San Jose, California

jblenio, tomorrow will come, and you will realize that you are still alive.
Apple hasn't stolen your family from you in the dead of night. They haven't killed your cat.
They simply introduced you to what launch day of a popular product is like.

You will live.


You are assuming Apple will make the same mistakes.
I'll wager that is a rather poor assumption.

What, no Newton? What kind of a fanboy are you, anyway?

Fortunately, not all 300,000 customers logged on at once; if that had happened our servers would have crashed or the service would have been on and off. We had what we believed to be good estimates and test scenarios but we were still surprised by how many people logged on to the system within the first 10 minutes, about 5000.

We discovered from the experience that when a company says a service will be available at a certain time they (customers) expect it to be perfect and fast. This is sort of expectation seems to becoming more important to customers as we are more dependent on mobile connectivity (not necessarily a bad or wrong expectation). And unfortunately, I think Apple underestimated this expectation and considering that this is the second high profile launch they should have expected this sort of problem could arise and perhaps staggered the release of MoblieMe, iPod Touch, and iPhone 3G.

I disagree. Sure they've had the bombs (Cube, 20th Anniversary Mac), mis-steps (Pippin), growing pains (transition to OS X), and bad PR (iPod batteries). And even when they had cases of software updates causing data loss only affect a very small percentage of users. I've been using Apple computers and been a fan since the Apple II. The last three days of MobileMe and iPhone issues is by far the the biggest end-user impacting problem I can remember Apple ever happening.


Yes, I think Apple may have grown too big for its britches. Ever since they announced the delay of Leopard to allow them to finish the iPhone on time last year they seem to be falling farther and farther behind their own ambitions. Companies often decline after they expand too fast (Krispy Kreme anyone?).

It may be time for Apple to take a step back and take a deep, collective breath. Put Snow Leopard on hold a short while to get their wits about them and get their bearings. There's a chance the the iPhone problems were contributed to by resources being distracted by the MobileMe fiasco. Time to spend some of those billions of dollars of cash they have lying around in strengthening their infrastructure and resources. It's time to buy some bigger britches.

You wrangled with the trackball on a Duo as well as installed OS 9 Servers and THIS gets under your skin? PERSPECTIVE, man! PERSPECTIVE!

John Blenio, San Jose, California - sorry to hear you didn't get a phone today, bro. It should probably be mentioned that it was commonly known that they weren't taking cash for them, but don't let that shake your rage - you've got a right to be up in arms so you up in those arms! Your unspoken (or in this case, typed) anger will surely stir the gods in Cupertino to... well... probably count another stack of fifties. But hey, you probably feel better now that you've got that off your chest... right?

I find it interesting some of you people deem it necessary to still back up Apple after this, saying they didn't screw up, they couldn't expect that this would all happen. Yeah, they didn't screw up--they royally rainbowed up with this one. No excuse for this to happen. It's just a phone? Some people's lives and businesses live primarily because of their phones. Half a day without a phone can potentially cost thousands of dollars of business, so I don't particularly disagree with people who might want compensation, but that's just me.

itunes now regognizes that version 2.0 exists and i click update then a small window appears and asks to cancel or learn more, then the store starts loading then 2 seconds later i am back to my ipod screen where it all started.
But this is progress, half an hour ago it told me that 1.1.4 was the current version

I don't believe I'm alone when I say I'm glad you're not in charge of things over there. Your analytical skills appear to need a little more time in the oven to bake.

Same here... A bit annoying but I can wait.