After the Long Wait, And the $600 -- iPhone Activation Hell

Oh boy! It seems that scores thousands of people, who waited in line for days for an iPhone are having trouble getting AT&T to activate their phones -- a problem that renders the phone an iBrick. An Engadget poll reports that 38% of iPhone buyers have iBricks!

Apple is said to have sold 1.5 million iPhones this weekend. That means there are a LOT of pissed off customers. And since so many are early adopters, like Steve Rubel and Thomas Hawk, many are singing their blues in well-read blogs. See why I told you to wait!

It's being called iGate, and iPhone Hell, and those are the polite terms. Engadget explains "So yeah, long story short, there's a few people out there left phoneless while AT&T gets its act together."

Reports are here, here, here, here and here. Robert Scoble, the lucky duck, seems to have had a great experience. Ditto for Amanda Congdon.

BL - this was highly predictable given the hype. Tom Raftery predicted it days before techmeme woke up. But...this is what you get when people buy into the halo effect around products and services. It won't be the last time because what we don't often admit to is that much of IT is akin to the fashion industry. Moving swiftly on.... -:)

I experienced no problems setting up my iPhone. I was an existing AT&T/Cingular/AT&T customer - don't know if that had any impact. The whole set up went very smoothly and I love the device.

If the registration was done before 8-9PM on Friday, it seems to have gone smoothly. Also, I think new numbers had no problems.

I activated my phone twice. For new number, it worked very smoothly. For the second time, for number porting, it didnt. But I got the confirmation in couple of hours.

http://rajuv.com/2007/06/29/iphone-is-locked-at-sim-level-too/

Call me a Luddite, call me old-fashioned, call me whatever, but I don't have a cell phone. I've found them too hard to hea. My landline phone doesn't give me such grief.

Okay, I guess that means you could call me "hard of hearing," and, memo to Apple and other cell phone makers: There are going to be a lot more of us in the coming years.

wow! really? no cell phone? i consider it a necessity, especially since 9/11.

but i certainly don't need an iPhone at this point.

and really, you ought to get your hearing checked out. you are so right taht there will be lots more of us saying "what? what?"

Sorry to hear that people had problems. I activated 2 iPhones on Monday (new accounts, transferred numbers over from Virgin Mobile) with no real problems.

I did have to call AT&T though. My wife and I set up a Family Plan account initially using her Mac, which made her name come up in caller ID when I called people.

The customer service rep I spoke to was friendly and helpful and resolved the problem immediately. She was a hoot to talk to as well. We were laughing about how insanely busy they were over the weekend and it wasn't letting up!

She was hoping that Apple would sell out of stock soon. :)