It is way past time for Apple to create a loyalty rewards program in which the only reward offered is first and trouble-free access to new releases. Your loyalty status could be based in the number of Apple products/devices associated with your Apple ID (I have over 15 to include Studio Display, mac mini, MBP, ATVs, HomePods, iPhones, iPads and five various AirPods). The most loyal brand cutomers should get a special site to order.
Was on promptly waiting at 8:00 am EDT. Like all, i got the “We’re getting ready” message. Then switched to the browser. I had set up my order in advance (for 2 Pro Max for me and wife). I clicked both links and just let it sit (it refreshed on its own). This was on Mac Mini.
In parallel i used the App Store on my iPad and connected through cellular. Same message. I let it all sit while i did some other things.
First to come up to the site was the iPad Apple Store app. But every time i tried my preset order, it just skipped back to the main page. I was about to walk through a manual new order when my Mac mini screens both popped to life prepopulated with the preset orders.
Clicked through both and got 2 15PM - White and Blue Titanium both delivering Sep 22.
All completed by about 8:12 am EDT
I have seen commonly here and there that 5:10 PDT seems to be the popular time people got in.
I couldn’t help but wonder if what apple experiences here is similar to a DDoS attack? Just too many people hitting the site at the exact same moment cripples it. I am guessing apple has some kind of failover that redirects traffic rather than crashing their site? Once the initial rush is over, things settle back to a manageable level.
Don’t crush me here. I know I don’t know what i am talking about (lol). Just speculating a little.
I think you're not wrong. It's exactly like a DDoS attack. They can plan for it, allow for pre-registration to reduce each customer's time and bandwidth to finalizetheir order, and whatever else, but it's still a matter of too many people trying to push through the door at one time. They could make the door bigger, but at some point, it's a waste of resources. There's a mad crush like this once, maybe twice a year, and it lasts maybe a couple of hours before things settle out. Think of shopping malls that build parking lots with "Black Friday" in mind, leaving a sea of unused, hot, ugly asphalt for the rest of the year.
I remember ordering something from Apple on release day, things getting hung up and disappointedly thinking I'd missed the early delivery dates, and then it popped up later as processed and good to go. The fact that I can't remember which device I was ordering when I had this experience speaks volumes about how unimportant it really is to be first in line for something like this. It's not a concert ticket that will be sold out if you don't get in early, it's an iPhone that will be on sale and available until the next model comes out a year from now.
Yeah, it’s SO WEIRD that scores of millions of people worldwide all hammering servers repeatedly and simultaneously at the exact same moment would see some issues … LOL
I was not one of the lucky ones. Despite pre-setting up the annual plan upgrade and getting up at 5, I’m missing launch date for the first time in years. Oct instead.
It is way past time for Apple to create a loyalty rewards program in which the only reward offered is first and trouble-free access to new releases. Your loyalty status could be based in the number of Apple products/devices associated with your Apple ID (I have over 15 to include Studio Display, mac mini, MBP, ATVs, HomePods, iPhones, iPads and five various AirPods). The most loyal brand cutomers should get a special site to order.
I’d kind of hoped the annual upgrade plan would work somewhat like that, helping guarantee launch day purchase. But it many ways it seems more problematic when ordering on day 1.
Like others found, this preorder was a debacle. I go through this process every year, set my order up and normally get on about 10 minutes into preorder and just buy my selected iPhone Pro Max. The App went live about 20 minutes in and the trade in kept bombing out. The App then offline and I went to my Mac and logged in on both personal and my business account. The business account was a complete disaster. The personal account finally worked about 40 minutes and I was able to secure one an hour’s drive for the 22nd in store pick up. The worst preorder experience that I have ever had.
And if you're with a carrier other than Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile, you can't pre-order at all. Not sure when they will add "connect to another carrier later" but it's not there now.
Nope. I was able to order my Blue UNLOCKED 1TB 15 Pro Max by 5:15 with delivery next Friday Sept 22. I’m with Red Pocket Mobile @$2.50 a month via the T-Mobile network. Love it! I’m in California USA. Red Pocket Mobile Unlimited Talk, Text & Data is $10 a month on your choice of carrier.
After chatting with them, I discovered that it's because I was trying to do the 0% financing through the Apple Card. Their terms have changed apparently, and they only do the 0% financing if you are with one of the big 3.
I just received a new Bank of America 3% Cash Back Mail Order Category card which has 15 months of zero interest plus a $200 reward for spending at least $1,000 in the first 90 days. So even though I had to buy the UNLOCKED iPhone outright for $1941 including AppleCare+ and sales tax (Blue 1TB 15 Pro Max) I still wind up with over $250 in rewards cash back plus an interest free loan for 15 months. And my $2.50 a month Red Pocket Mobile via T-Mobile’s network (prepaid @$30 a year on Red Pocket’s EBay store) is good to go.
EddyMac said: And if you're with a carrier other than Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile, you can't pre-order at all. Not sure when they will add "connect to another carrier later" but it's not there now.
Nope. I was able to order my Blue UNLOCKED 1TB 15 Pro Max by 5:15 with delivery next Friday Sept 22. I’m with Red Pocket Mobile @$2.50 a month via the T-Mobile network. Love it! I’m in California USA. Red Pocket Mobile Unlimited Talk, Text & Data is $10 a month on your choice of carrier.
After chatting with them, I discovered that it's because I was trying to do the 0% financing through the Apple Card. Their terms have changed apparently, and they only do the 0% financing if you are with one of the big 3.
Just confirmed it in app. Man, that is lame. Why should my Apple credit card be tied to the 3 big carriers!?
It shouldn’t. But that’s corporate America for you.
Since no-one knows the pre-order inventory level, I t’s kind of silly to get excited about delivery dates starting to slip…
Exactly. This happens every single time. The way Apple plays this is beautiful. Hell, they could have a thousand available for order! LOL.
There’s no financial incentive to under-producing and making people unhappy with long waits. The financial incentive is to produce as many as they can ahead of time, which is what they do. (Obviously it’s never enough)
And if you're with a carrier other than Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile, you can't pre-order at all. Not sure when they will add "connect to another carrier later" but it's not there now.
I Think the issue is you can't get the free financing without linking to one of the big three, I had no issue Pre-ording with the add carrier latter, using another card, Just couldn't do it with my apple card. Which is sad, and why I got an apple card.
And if you're with a carrier other than Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile, you can't pre-order at all. Not sure when they will add "connect to another carrier later" but it's not there now.
Nope. I was able to order my Blue UNLOCKED 1TB 15 Pro Max by 5:15 with delivery next Friday Sept 22. I’m with Red Pocket Mobile @$2.50 a month via the T-Mobile network. Love it! I’m in California USA. Red Pocket Mobile Unlimited Talk, Text & Data is $10 a month on your choice of carrier.
After chatting with them, I discovered that it's because I was trying to do the 0% financing through the Apple Card. Their terms have changed apparently, and they only do the 0% financing if you are with one of the big 3.
Just confirmed it in app. Man, that is lame. Why should my Apple credit card be tied to the 3 big carriers!?
I found out about this days ago, It's the reason I got the apple card. But I found a work around, apply for the Wells Fargo card, they give you 15 Months no interest on new purchases, 2% cash back, a $200 Bonus, if you charge enough the first three months (The i phone meets it) and if you put your cell service on the card each month, they give you $600 in phone protection.This actually changed for the Apple card, on Aug 15th. So you can only assume it was intentional, and aimed at us. Wells Fargo, took the application on line, approved me on the spot, if you add their app to your phone, you can Put it in your wallet at the same time, took me less than 15 Min to set up, actual card arrived 7 days latter.This seems counter Business for Apple to do this, But you have to assume there is a financial kick back, or something.
EddyMac said: And if you're with a carrier other than Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile, you can't pre-order at all. Not sure when they will add "connect to another carrier later" but it's not there now.
Nope. I was able to order my Blue UNLOCKED 1TB 15 Pro Max by 5:15 with delivery next Friday Sept 22. I’m with Red Pocket Mobile @$2.50 a month via the T-Mobile network. Love it! I’m in California USA. Red Pocket Mobile Unlimited Talk, Text & Data is $10 a month on your choice of carrier.
After chatting with them, I discovered that it's because I was trying to do the 0% financing through the Apple Card. Their terms have changed apparently, and they only do the 0% financing if you are with one of the big 3.
Just confirmed it in app. Man, that is lame. Why should my Apple credit card be tied to the 3 big carriers!?
It shouldn’t. But that’s corporate America for you.
Just did the same thing with a new wells Fargo card and Cricket as a carrier, Black Pro max 1TB with apple care. Shame apple card did this, But people will find a work around.
I tried different ways on my iPhone and Mac to finish my order. I had preregistered the iPhone and got online at 4:45 AM Mountain time. With the site being opened at 5:00 AM Nothing worked until I decided to go online and put in another preorder. When I did, it took me to my preorder and I was able to complete my order at 5:24 AM. Glad I decided to try this way else I would be still waiting as the screens did not change. What I don't get is that Apple has gone through this for years and still can't get it right. There is no excuse for this. Apple takes so much time telling us about how ecologically friendly they are. Why not spend some time and money on making the entire order process more customer-friendly? After all, your customers are the ones that are paying for all of this.
The iPhone is the most demanded product in the world at launch. Server farms are a known quantity and this type of issue is not unique to Apple, especially at such unique demand. It’s not a matter of desire. It’s a matter of server farms not being infinite in capacity.
That was the worst pre-order process I’ve experienced in years. Despite having all the pre-qualification stuff done (and waking on time for these stupid early morning pre-order launches), I spent a half hour experiencing various errors before it could even access my pre-order information. By the time it let me complete the transaction my estimated delivery was October 9-16. Very disappointing.
Indeed same boat here. Hmmm the most valuable company in the world cannot even get it right…
The fact that they sold out almost instantly is why they're the most valuable company lol. There isn't much any company can do when you have half the US trying to order a phone at the same time along with international orders coming in as well.
This was the first time I have participated in pre sale and I can’t say it was a positive experience, actually the opposite. I’m software developer and did some e-commerce projects so I can sympathise with the team of DevOps trying their best when the site crashed just before the orders opened, but what happened next and the checkout process was in short usability nightmare. As many I my self tried to preselected the phone before launch, that was wasted time as it appeared, next after filling signing in with my apple ID and filling up my informations again (common apple you have all the info from my apple account) and again for the collection only after selecting the day and time to kick me off and say it is not available anymore to select another day for collecting and filling all the info again. Than finally got to the clicking on order button and getting error message saying that payment info is incorrect ( after further investigation and calling the payment provider turned out the payment provider system crashed- Ok I can’t blame Apple for that, but the error message was just so misleading and you guessed it right refilling the form again, right now I gone from selecting 24 September to some time in November and my order is still in on hold, despite getting confirmation from the payment provider that the payment went through. At this point I’m thinking just cancelling the order and just wait for the phone to be normally available in shops some time in December- January maybe. My question to apple and the checkout team is how hard can it be to pull my info from my profile first, let others who’s not buying it for them self to fill out the form, again with the collection details pull the info from the profile again and let people who are not buying it for the self to correct the details, third major improvement could be once you select the day and time slot give the user at least 5-10 minutes to complete rest of the checkout process before telling them that slot is not available anymore before you kick them out only to start everything all over again. I thought the pre selling event will be dignified experience, but it turned to digital equivalent of people crushing each other in overcrowded Walmart in black Friday. I was never going to be standing queue in front of the store as I have better things to do, but this all process was pretty much no better than that. I’m still going to buy the phone and other Apple products, however never again on pre sale or shortly after release.
I was getting on a plane. 8:00 just as my name was called. Kept trying until we took off and my connection went away. Soon as we landed, I finally got through. Considering the fact that I couldn’t place my order until after 9, was happy that I’ll only be waiting until the first or second week of October.
Since no-one knows the pre-order inventory level, I t’s kind of silly to get excited about delivery dates starting to slip…
Exactly. This happens every single time. The way Apple plays this is beautiful. Hell, they could have a thousand available for order! LOL.
There’s no financial incentive to under-producing and making people unhappy with long waits. The financial incentive is to produce as many as they can ahead of time, which is what they do. (Obviously it’s never enough)
LOL. Okay. Yeah, that's what they're doing.
Ummm, no. What they are likely doing is estimating—probably was some reasonable degree of accuracy—how many they need and producing just enough, or probably slightly less. They want to sell as many as possible without excess inventory. They want it tight. And then what happens is they sell an optimal amount while also giving the appearance of amazing demand while they unleash additional production orders to pace with actual (vs. estimated) demand. Plus they know people will wait. So they optimize for all of these factors. They are certainly not "producing as many as they can ahead of time." It's incredibly naive to think they are. Apple is and amazingly savvy company in this way. And they have successfully bamboozled some people into thinking that they have produced as many as possible but still can't make enough. LOL
I don’t agree. There would be no reason for them to do that. They KNOW that no matter how many are produced for them, they will sell them shortly. This isn’t near the end of the year, it’s a new phone. The problems are in manufacturing, if it does happen. They can never tell if some small glitch will occur, slowing production down for a day, which would result in tens of thousands of phones being one day late, and pushing the entire production line back by a day. Maybe they can make up for that in a week or so, but not right away. But it’s not enough to interrupt the sales of millions of phones the first day.
this didn’t seem anything like that. I turned the app on 15 minutes early as I’m sure most people did. Nobody was ordering yet. The store opened over 10 minutes late. That has nothing to do with product shortages. Then it couldn’t get to the order and said to try again later. Since I was certainly one of the very first to have tried to get in, I doubt they already were selling the first batch out. But then, when it said, at the very end, that my session timed out and I had to do the entire order over from scratch, that wasn’t due to shortages either.
so no, shortages had nothing to do with this. Perhaps, Apple will explain what happened, and possibly not. But it was a glitch if some sort in the store process, not lack of product.
i have cell service from Verizon on my iPad from which I was ordering. No problem. My wife, doesn’t want cell service in hers as she almost never takes it out of the house. She had a problem with Verizon. When she changed here order to her iPhone which, of course, does have Verizon, it went through without a problem. Something to think about.
And if you're with a carrier other than Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile, you can't pre-order at all. Not sure when they will add "connect to another carrier later" but it's not there now.
Nope. I was able to order my Blue UNLOCKED 1TB 15 Pro Max by 5:15 with delivery next Friday Sept 22. I’m with Red Pocket Mobile @$2.50 a month via the T-Mobile network. Love it! I’m in California USA. Red Pocket Mobile Unlimited Talk, Text & Data is $10 a month on your choice of carrier.
After chatting with them, I discovered that it's because I was trying to do the 0% financing through the Apple Card. Their terms have changed apparently, and they only do the 0% financing if you are with one of the big 3.
I just received a new Bank of America 3% Cash Back Mail Order Category card which has 15 months of zero interest plus a $200 reward for spending at least $1,000 in the first 90 days. So even though I had to buy the UNLOCKED iPhone outright for $1941 including AppleCare+ and sales tax (Blue 1TB 15 Pro Max) I still wind up with over $250 in rewards cash back plus an interest free loan for 15 months. And my $2.50 a month Red Pocket Mobile via T-Mobile’s network (prepaid @$30 a year on Red Pocket’s EBay store) is good to go.
Just did the same thing with Wells Fargo; Black Pro max 1TB, apple care plus..... The Apple card was easier in the past to handle, But Now that they want to force you into $35 a month Interest, if your not paying $45 a month more for service, it was time to find another way. I use Cricket, family plan.
Comments
I remember ordering something from Apple on release day, things getting hung up and disappointedly thinking I'd missed the early delivery dates, and then it popped up later as processed and good to go. The fact that I can't remember which device I was ordering when I had this experience speaks volumes about how unimportant it really is to be first in line for something like this. It's not a concert ticket that will be sold out if you don't get in early, it's an iPhone that will be on sale and available until the next model comes out a year from now.
Bode.
I Think the issue is you can't get the free financing without linking to one of the big three, I had no issue Pre-ording with the add carrier latter, using another card, Just couldn't do it with my apple card. Which is sad, and why I got an apple card.
I found out about this days ago, It's the reason I got the apple card. But I found a work around, apply for the Wells Fargo card, they give you 15 Months no interest on new purchases, 2% cash back, a $200 Bonus, if you charge enough the first three months (The i phone meets it) and if you put your cell service on the card each month, they give you $600 in phone protection.This actually changed for the Apple card, on Aug 15th. So you can only assume it was intentional, and aimed at us. Wells Fargo, took the application on line, approved me on the spot, if you add their app to your phone, you can Put it in your wallet at the same time, took me less than 15 Min to set up, actual card arrived 7 days latter.This seems counter Business for Apple to do this, But you have to assume there is a financial kick back, or something.
Just did the same thing with a new wells Fargo card and Cricket as a carrier, Black Pro max 1TB with apple care. Shame apple card did this, But people will find a work around.
I’m software developer and did some e-commerce projects so I can sympathise with the team of DevOps trying their best when the site crashed just before the orders opened, but what happened next and the checkout process was in short usability nightmare.
As many I my self tried to preselected the phone before launch, that was wasted time as it appeared, next after filling signing in with my apple ID and filling up my informations again (common apple you have all the info from my apple account) and again for the collection only after selecting the day and time to kick me off and say it is not available anymore to select another day for collecting and filling all the info again. Than finally got to the clicking on order button and getting error message saying that payment info is incorrect ( after further investigation and calling the payment provider turned out the payment provider system crashed- Ok I can’t blame Apple for that, but the error message was just so misleading and you guessed it right refilling the form again, right now I gone from selecting 24 September to some time in November and my order is still in on hold, despite getting confirmation from the payment provider that the payment went through. At this point I’m thinking just cancelling the order and just wait for the phone to be normally available in shops some time in December- January maybe.
My question to apple and the checkout team is how hard can it be to pull my info from my profile first, let others who’s not buying it for them self to fill out the form, again with the collection details pull the info from the profile again and let people who are not buying it for the self to correct the details, third major improvement could be once you select the day and time slot give the user at least 5-10 minutes to complete rest of the checkout process before telling them that slot is not available anymore before you kick them out only to start everything all over again.
I thought the pre selling event will be dignified experience, but it turned to digital equivalent of people crushing each other in overcrowded Walmart in black Friday. I was never going to be standing queue in front of the store as I have better things to do, but this all process was pretty much no better than that. I’m still going to buy the phone and other Apple products, however never again on pre sale or shortly after release.
this didn’t seem anything like that. I turned the app on 15 minutes early as I’m sure most people did. Nobody was ordering yet. The store opened over 10 minutes late. That has nothing to do with product shortages. Then it couldn’t get to the order and said to try again later. Since I was certainly one of the very first to have tried to get in, I doubt they already were selling the first batch out. But then, when it said, at the very end, that my session timed out and I had to do the entire order over from scratch, that wasn’t due to shortages either.
so no, shortages had nothing to do with this. Perhaps, Apple will explain what happened, and possibly not. But it was a glitch if some sort in the store process, not lack of product.
i have cell service from Verizon on my iPad from which I was ordering. No problem. My wife, doesn’t want cell service in hers as she almost never takes it out of the house. She had a problem with Verizon. When she changed here order to her iPhone which, of course, does have Verizon, it went through without a problem. Something to think about.
Just did the same thing with Wells Fargo; Black Pro max 1TB, apple care plus..... The Apple card was easier in the past to handle, But Now that they want to force you into $35 a month Interest, if your not paying $45 a month more for service, it was time to find another way. I use Cricket, family plan.