On Jun 30, 2007, at Jun 30, 7:45 AM, SnazzlePuss wrote: > Is it living up to the hype? How big are the sellouts?
Executive Summary:
Yes. Complete.
Here's my take. iPhone appears to be doing well; Apple has a web page showing each store's current stockpile, but it reads pretty much zero right now. There were some early-on rough spots activating some iPhones, and of course you can't please everyone in the world feature-wise. Apple I'm sure thought just as long and hard on which features to omit as to which to include, but the consensus is thumbs way up. So far, let's wait for 15 more weeks.
And there were complaints of Apple over-hyping iPhone, but, truth be told, the media and blogosphere did that all by themselves. I mean, Apple had to make an actual announcement sometime, and that was January 2007, 2.5 years after development began. Then came the "Hello" TV commercial that aired 2-3 times during the Academy Awards. Other than that one commercial and a few web pages, Apple said nothing for months. Until June that is, when 4 new TV ads sprouted. And then Apple began reeling folks in with a new teaser every week or so: longer battery life, glass screen instead of plastic, and to top matters off they posted long instructional movies detailing exactly what the phone could do, and how you'd do it. Masterful - no other handset has such a nice user manual :) Oh, I see the iPhone Buzz-O-Meter is just now beginning to fall-off.
Then there's EDGE. But I say any-baud is better than zero-baud - iPhone has infinitely faster WI-FI too. And it's not disabled as some other vendors do before they "approve" a handset for sale, just so they can force you onto their expensive data networks.
What, no physical keyboard? Yup, that's right, it just wastes valuable screen real estate. You CrackBerry zealots took way more than 6 days learning to double-thumb those miniscule hard-keys :)
And the orchestration of the Apple/ATT store openings / iPhone launch on June 29th was incredible. How many iPhones would be "just right"? Too few and Baby Bear cries because he didn't get an iPhone. Too many and the store lines don't materialize and Papa Bear makes a killing selling excess iPhones on E-Bay. Just right and Mama Bear gets her porridge but doesn't aggravate her 'roids waiting in a too-long line, and all the E-Bay futures traders look like fools.
During the iPhone weekend launch Apple/ATT sold around 500,000 iPhones, and after 6 days ATT had processed 1,000,000 activations (hearsay as I type this, awaiting confirmation). How are you going to stuff a million iPhone purchases and activations though the traditional "go to the wireless store" pipe in that short amount of time? You don't, you need a better idea. So they sell you a handset and send you home where you can activate at your leisure through iTunes. Cool.
How do you get a million+ iPhones to 2,000 stores safely and secretly on launch day? By direct flights from overseas manufacturers to the US overnight, and then rapid and well-planned distribution from a few select sites around the country. You arrange for staffers to be there over-night to take delivery early Friday morning, June 29. You close the stores for 2-ish hours that afternoon to re-stock just in time for the 06:00 PM blastoff. Why Friday evening? You maximize a workers day! Going to work an hour early so you can leave for an evening launch sits much better with the boss than, say,leaving work at 10:00 AM. Slick.
The iPhone itself, as a consumer cell phone, video iPod and web-surfing convergence device, is the new standard. It's not quite business-ready - yet. It's running Mac OS X, although on an ARM processor, rather than Intel like your iMac, or PPC like my PowerMac. And although iPhone doesn't have the Aqua UI like on a desktop Mac, it shares the same kernel and graphics and multi-media frameworks, so technologies like QuickTime just work. Which means that there is a common software base, developed by a common set of Mac OS X engineers, and that that software can be easily upgraded by automatic updates, via iTunes, just like an iPod, or an Apple TV. The installed base of Mac OS X is growing very rapidly now.
So, after 3 years of development, iPhone is kicking some butt, and in various areas:
Does iPhone have warts? Um, yes. Does iPhone rule? Looks like it.
Oh, and Ratatouille opened the same day and is garnering a 96% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, another great job by Steve's (former) Pixar Animation Studio.