Dear Shawn,
I've been thinking a bit about the iPhone 4 launch and all the attendant hyperbole and downright whining going on. Tuesday morning, I hopped online to reserve our iPhone 4s. 3 minutes later, both were reserved. Every time I utter that, I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out "I hate you!" and were suddenly silenced.
The 600,000 number has been thrown around quite a bit, but it's not the relevant number. 600,000 is merely the number of iPhones that were successfully reserved before they ran out of their reserved stock. It is not the number of people who were online attempting to reserve one. I don't know if anyone knows the real number, but it could be an order of magnitude higher.
When someone says that AT&T or Apple "should have known" how high the demand was going to be, I ask the question "Do you actually know how high it was?" Imagine if your store usually gets 50 customers for its events. Knowing that you've got unusually high demand, you plan for 100 - 200. Then you get socked with 1000.
Every one of these people had to access an AT&T account, which then had to be run through all its algorithms to determine what plan they were on and what they were eligible for. I wonder if the waiving of ETF for any who were eligible this year was simply for their own sake in a vain attempt to simplify matters. Again, this is all guessing. The fact remains, however, that the people complaining do not know what the real numbers are. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
As far as bandwidth goes, we must keep in mind not only how extremely expensive it is to service this many people, but also how hard it is to get new towers past red tape, local politicians who want their palms greased, and NIMBYs. It's an annoying situation to be in. If AT&T and Apple want to deflect complaints, however, they might want to consider being a little more open about what the problems really are.
So....does this thing actually work?
