Cochinoman tech, sushi, poker
After watching the mayhem from the last iteration of iPhone mania, I already knew it would not be easy to reserve the new iPhone 4 online. But something like that has not stopped me in the past and won’t deter me now. I knew standing in line at the Apple store, going to AT&T, Best Buy or Radio Shack would be out of the question. From my past experience, I know that most of the clerks won’t even know what I’m talking about and/or just help me go to the Apple or AT&T website.
Starting at midnight, I started refreshing the Apple website on the iPhone page once every 10-15 minutes and got nothing very interesting. After many attempts, I finally got this screen.
Ready for pre-order?
When I tried to start the pre-order process, I kept getting this message below:
Apple server confused or busy
Inactivity!? I’m typing my address in as fast as I can. After a while, I figured out that the website was not really ready to take my pre-order so I waited. When I tried again later, I kept getting this message below:
Apple website probably being updated
When I got the “Oops!” message, there was no way to return back to the normal part of the Apple website except just to re-start from scratch. On one of my tries, I got this crazy screen:
Whoa! WTF!?
I have no idea what this error means but I’m sure my pre-order didn’t go through. Then around 3am, I finally got this message.
Apple website getting ready for pre-orders
This is what happened last time when they were pre-order selling the iPad so I already knew that I would have to wait until about 5-5:30am until the website was back up. While doing other work on my computer, I kept periodically refreshing the browser.
At about 5:30-ish, I was able to get back on but still kept getting errors. I was not able to get the online store to ship to me, maybe because I’m not a current AT&T customer, or because the AT&T servers were overtaxed, so I decided to try picking it up at the Apple store.
By the way, the white iPhone is not available for pre-order. If that’s what you want, you’ll just have to wait. Personally, I like the black one better. It looks more Vader-ish.
But I digress.
After several attempts at trying to do the pickup at the Apple store, I finally got to this:
Booyah!! Jackpot!
According to their email, I have to the end of business day on June 24 to pick up my iPhone at the Apple store. Nice.
In hindsight, I probably should have just waited a few hours and let everybody use the servers, then did my pre-ordering. But what would be the fun in that?
