Apple wanted a spectacle when the iPhone went on sale this evening, and it got just that.
Customers eager to be among the first to buy the long-awaited cellphone waited in long lines in front of Apple stores in New York and other cities. Some had camped out there for several days. Shorter lines were seen at AT&T stores, which also carry the phone.
The iPhone, which sells for $500 and $600 depending on the amount of built-in memory, then went on sale at 6 p.m.
Shortly after that, the first elated customers began emerging from the glass-cube Apple store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Norbert Pauli, 52, who had spent all night in line, said, “I guess I didn’t need to get in line because they have thousands of them in there. But for me it was a fun thing.”
The sweaty tangle of people who lined up outside the store included a customer service representative for a trucking company who took a vacation day to make her first Apple purchase, a jazz musician who declared, “I don’t stand in line for anything,” and a tourist from Argentina who said he wasn’t even sure the phone would work once he got it home.
At Apple stores across the country, there were the so-called iCultists, the Internet entrepreneurs and technology consultants who would have surprised you if they had said they didn’t wait in line all night. But then there were the iConverts, the not-so-savvy Apple customers who didn’t know much about the iPhone other than that they had to have it.
Welcome to our cult, folks. Please don’t bring your Windows baggage with you.
Nationwide coverage from Macworld! iPhone release brings out the crowds
It begins…
Unboxed at Wired Gadget Lab!
Yee-haw! Everyone’s got cracklin’ synapses firing off glorious electrochemical patterns in the shape of a bitten apple silhouette.
Well, as I’ve mentioned already, I won’t be buying one until the second version is released. By then, it will be cheaper, more powerful, less buggy, and running Leopard. I will, however, be trying to win one in about twenty minutes on G4’s Free Stuff, and so should you.
What—like you need another excuse to behold the exquisite, unbridled übergeek hotness of Morgan Webb? Mmmm… Morgan Webb…