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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
there seems to be no reason why the actual activation could not be completed at home.
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.
Even when there's no wait during the next week or so, hopefully they'll have the iTunes issue sorted out so it won't take 35 to 40 minutes.
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.
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#.
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.
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.
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
Quote:
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.
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.
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 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.
I wouldn't worry about all the current issues. They'll be resolved within 48 hours and forgotten within a month... Long term, it's a good sign that the iPhone 3G is going to be a success.
very insightful, c'mon what do you expect after the first iphone situation, i guess it went as good as it could
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
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 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.
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.
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.
I went to my AT&T store to pickup my iPhone 16GB black this morning and it was not nearly as difficult. I got in line at 6:30 and was 11th in line (small town of about 20,000 ppl). The store said they only had roughly 30 units total though. I am on a family talk plan and am not primary account holder, but I was never asked about it regardless. I got in, they took my SIM from my 1st generation iPhone and put it into the new iPhone, and I walked out after paying. Activation took about 1-2 minutes at 8:20 EST. They did not ask for identification, SSN, or anything, just my phone number. I suppose I could have given them someone else's phone number and prolly got off with the phone charging someone else's account. Either way, the security at the AT&T stores was nowhere near as high as Apple stores...anyone else have similar experience at AT&T stores?
I was in the same boat as you. Got @ the AT&T store near my home @ 5AM, was the 10th person in line. It was fun waiting in line as we all talked about the iPhone and other apple products. Store had 8 registers. I got at a register @ 8:15 and was out by 8:30. My contract was expired and I did not own a 1st generation iPhone. Activation was not an issue. However price was.
I was charged $499 instead of $299 upgrade prices. The manager said that they couldn't do anything about it at that time and suggested we call customer service to see if we could get a credit back. Called customer service @ 10:15 am - only 1 minute wait time ! They also agreed that we should have been charged $299. They noted this in the account, went back to the AT&T store later in the afternoon, and they credited my credit card back $200.
The line was very organized - manager went down the line with a sign-in list and had the supply cut-off marked. This way, if someone arrived late, the didn't have to stand in line for nothing. Store had 60 iPhones in stock and was sold out by 10:00 AM.
Glad that I waited those 3 hours for the iPHone, it was worth the wait !
Comments
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.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.
there seems to be no reason why the actual activation could not be completed at home.
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.
You mean almost 3 hours. Ugh...
Even when there's no wait during the next week or so, hopefully they'll have the iTunes issue sorted out so it won't take 35 to 40 minutes.
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.
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#.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
I wouldn't worry about all the current issues. They'll be resolved within 48 hours and forgotten within a month... Long term, it's a good sign that the iPhone 3G is going to be a success.
very insightful, c'mon what do you expect after the first iphone situation, i guess it went as good as it could
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?
HEHE I love these foot-in-mouth posts.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 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.
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.
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.
I went to my AT&T store to pickup my iPhone 16GB black this morning and it was not nearly as difficult. I got in line at 6:30 and was 11th in line (small town of about 20,000 ppl). The store said they only had roughly 30 units total though. I am on a family talk plan and am not primary account holder, but I was never asked about it regardless. I got in, they took my SIM from my 1st generation iPhone and put it into the new iPhone, and I walked out after paying. Activation took about 1-2 minutes at 8:20 EST. They did not ask for identification, SSN, or anything, just my phone number. I suppose I could have given them someone else's phone number and prolly got off with the phone charging someone else's account. Either way, the security at the AT&T stores was nowhere near as high as Apple stores...anyone else have similar experience at AT&T stores?
I was in the same boat as you. Got @ the AT&T store near my home @ 5AM, was the 10th person in line. It was fun waiting in line as we all talked about the iPhone and other apple products. Store had 8 registers. I got at a register @ 8:15 and was out by 8:30. My contract was expired and I did not own a 1st generation iPhone. Activation was not an issue. However price was.
I was charged $499 instead of $299 upgrade prices. The manager said that they couldn't do anything about it at that time and suggested we call customer service to see if we could get a credit back. Called customer service @ 10:15 am - only 1 minute wait time ! They also agreed that we should have been charged $299. They noted this in the account, went back to the AT&T store later in the afternoon, and they credited my credit card back $200.
The line was very organized - manager went down the line with a sign-in list and had the supply cut-off marked. This way, if someone arrived late, the didn't have to stand in line for nothing. Store had 60 iPhones in stock and was sold out by 10:00 AM.
Glad that I waited those 3 hours for the iPHone, it was worth the wait !