Across the pond things were even worse. We have had our Supplier's (O2) network crash on the morning of the launch and the lines outside of stores were terrible with tons and tons of people complaining, I was sent away and told that I could come back in 2-3 hours to get my iPhone 16gb which would then be delivered today. Surprise, surprise, the network over sold the iPhone and people who were promised their phone today were told they don't know when the next delivery will be. Now I am paying for a contract and NO iPhone. I have taken my complaints to the network, luckily they have promised a refund on the time spent without an iPhone. This is an absolute farce, no gadget should be worth this much agony. By know If it was any other phone supplier, I would have had an apology. This happened with a broken Motorola which was sold to me a few years ago (They also had the decency to throw in 3 months half price line rental)

As I have seen posted about the launch the best way for apple to do was to let mobileMe launch a few days earlier and have the rollout for the 2.0 software for the 1st gen phones on July 17, 2008. That way more reason to sell & upgrade to the 3G and take the traffic off the servers as all the 1st gen iPhone users went to download on 7/11. I for one did the smart thing and went to an out of the way ATT Store @ 6:30AM. By 8:29AM was out the door with a working 3G iPhone. I went to the Apple store about 30 miles from my home @ 2PM and they had over a 3 hour line to get in and was not looking good for them to have a working iphone. I hope Mr Steve thinks of a way to make it all better to the FanBoys who lost a weekend on this fiascos. I know! Free MobileME!

Even the Best of the Best have mis steps. No Company is perfect. Yes I agree they could have handled this multiple launch better, but the fact remains most services are now back online and functioning. To conclude AAPL still is the envy of other hand held OEM's and carriers and they only wish they had the same problem AAPL had on launch and over the weekend. Lets C.. hmmmm

1million plus iPhone 3Gs sold... Not bad in 4 days.

For the record... NO OTHER COMPANY OUT THERE HAS WHAT AAPL has created and it will be some time before they catch up... by that time it will be to late... iPod 2001 all over again.

Just the remote App alone for my iPod touch was worth a little growing pains. Now i have push mail and I am no longer a slave to MSFT.

Ijah420 says get over it and MOVE ON and Think Forward...Jah Live Apple & Company.

A Minor,minor glitch. Certainly, harsh reaction. Do I dectect jealousy, envy and vindictiveness. I purchased a 3G yesterday, downloaded all sorts of applications without a hitch and am now enjoying faultless mobile computing. Could not be more pleased. So eat your words!!!

I'm a Machead and for the most part love Apple products. But I'm actually happy that Apple's unprecedented success has be tempered with a little humiliation these last few days. This hard lesson should help them develop into a well-rounded citizen instead of another bully on the block.

Sure, it was irritating. Disaster, catastrophe, iPocalypse and so forth are all hyperbole. But could Apple have done it any other way without getting a chorus of complainers from one camp or another.

If Apple released the iPhone 2.0 update before July 11, there may have been a large number of 1G iPhone users who might have delayed a 3G purchase after seeing how the update helped their existing phone. The most logical alternative would have been to release the iPhone 2.0 software for older phones a few days after the big July 11 rollout. This would stick it to cheapskates and late adopters (like me) and reward the new customers with the first use of the new way. Of course, my cheapskate brethren would have been howling like banshees.

In any case, it seems that by late in the day Friday and during the weekend, almost all of the problems were resolved. I realize that headlines with DISASTER in them get more attention than ones with "annoyance," but you have to remember that one about the boy who cried wolf.

"Disaster"

Katrina was a disaster. California fires, Iowa floods and Indonesian tsunamis are disasters. But the relatively brief disgruntlement of Apple consumers?

You know, on the Monday after the half-weekend "disaster," things seem pretty much okay.

Here's to the attention grabbing worth of hyperbolic story titles, and nothing more.

Cheers,

PO

Tell you what - once you've developed a product which is so successful that you generate $200 M in revenue in one weekend, then you can complain about the execution. Sure, there were problems, but within about 10 hours, everything was pretty much back to normal. Are they perfect? No. But did they do a darned great job of introducing a new product that probably sold faster than any new electronics product ever? Sure.

So what's YOUR excuse for an inane article?

Hmmm.... Activate a record 1,000,000 in 48 hours world wide and you write an article trolling for web hits.

You're an idiot and a whore.
RC

Oh the horror, the humanity! Only one million iPhones sold and ten million app downloads in the first weekend.
Apple will work even harder on their rollout resources so that the first day is not so rocky (especially on the East coast where the loudest voices reside) the next time, but RIM and Nokia would love to have such a "disaster" of too many buyers.

I waited till Sunday to update one iPod Touch and a first generation iPhone to the new version and I am happy to report that both process proceeded without a hitch. The longest part is downloading the software which took about 20 minutes. So I think the glitch was akin to seeing a crowd of football fans stampeding towards the gates of the stadium at opening times. It will always look uglier than it is.
By the way I love the way Chinese characters input is implemented in the version 2.0. I bet this will be a real selling point in China and even Japan.

And yet the world goes on.

Sure there were a couple planning foibles. Changing the date of the gen 1 iPhone updates and MobileMe would have helped. But Apple is going to have problems when you have thousands and thousands of buyers getting the product on opening day.

A million. Think about that number. Turn on a million light switches at the same time and you trip a breaker. Flush a million toilets and you cause a flood. Their's is a system designed to activate a million phones, but how many times are a million phones activated at once? Give them a break.

I disagree with your blog.
People need to get a life. The iPhone is a state-of-the-art device. Glitches happen when a device is new or when it is updated. Take a deep breath relax and Apple will correct any snafus as quickly as possible.

I just don't see this as a big deal. Especially when they apparently sold a million of the things. Demand exceeded expectations. I doubt many people are going to remember in three months how difficult it may have been to activate or upgrade their iPhone on Friday. Myself, I didn't get to upgrade my iPhone until yesterday and it could not have gone smoother. I had no issue at all throughout the whole time I was reading about this "disaster".

Writing from Los Angeles: I stood in line for four hours on Saturday to get my new iPhone. I thought the four-hour waiting time was because of Friday's system crashes, which I figured they would've worked out by Saturday. Turns out they were still experiencing crashes on Saturday. It was a horrible way to spend four hours (although the weather was thankfully nice), for which I fault AT&T, not Apple, because I'm sure it was their idea (they shouldn't penalize the millions of users who DON'T try to unlock their iPhones to deal with the thousands who do -- and after this weekend, you can bet I will get out of my AT&T contract as soon as I "legally" can). I agree Apple should have staggered the launch dates for the iPhone system upgrade, MobileMe and the G3 iPhone. There's a lot that sucks about what happened. And with any other company and any other product line, I would've said, "I'm never using their merchandise again!" But I can't say that with Apple. Their stuff is just too good. Even the G3 iPhone, despite the litany of flaws rightly leveled against it, is an awesome piece of technology. I'll gripe and gripe, but I'll never switch.

David Zeiler, well known Microsoft shill, from ZDNET wrote: "Despite being an Apple advocate, I have to give the company a collective slap upside the head for this one."

Apple advocate??? you bought and paid for POS.

Let's add it a bit of perspective please. One heckuva product, one heckuva launch, and I'm sorry if the 'I need it NOW' generation has become a bit spoiled. I was thirteenth in line in Austin, TX, at 6:30 on Friday morning. After the open, porting a number over, fine and quick. Access and approval via Apple store to AT&T and back, great, fine and quick. A little hitch with Apple's servers and iTunes, was offered to go home and connect vs. standing in the store. Nice of them to offer. After I connected at home the same morning, about an hour later, I was synced and enjoying the finest hand-held digital device on the planet. And my mail worked, mobileme mail, maybe I waited on some features, but I didn't miss any mail.

Let's relax and put this in perspective, no one else in this arena has come close to providing this kind of device or these kind of services as a package. I can handle a bit of 'opening day' strain, I was really quite unaffected and happy to have my new iPhone.

Man, dude, it should never happen ready another article made by David Zeiler. you diserve Windoze man.

"Less orchestrated, less dramatic yes, but minus the meltdown."

Agreed! I'm a big Apple consumer - 1st gen iPhone, several iPods, I have used .Mac for 3 years. I have an Apple TV, a couple of Macs, loads of Airport Express stations. I always upgrade iLife and OS X with each release. My point is I'm a big fan and I usually give Apple the credit they deserve.

They deserve this backlash. Suddenly my iPhone gets bricked for a day because I can't connect to iTunes' servers during the 2.0 upgrade, and I lose my iDisk and various Mac services (which I pay quite a bit for) for another couple of days.

I really like MobileMe - a big improvement on .Mac. And I really like iPhone 2.0. But both are quite buggy for a general release, and even after the bungled launch, both are quite a bit slower than their predecessors. Whatever happened to 'it just works'?

The mass market doesn't suit Apple's big-bang product releases. We don't expect same-day product releases after the Stevenote any more. Maybe we should stop expecting these iDays as well.

In less than 72 hours everything was basically working smoothly. This was no disaster. A year from now no one will remember that there were hiccups when these products and services came online.

I'm sorry but after 72 hours, the Apple discussion boards cannot keep up with all the complaints from users because Mobile Me is a piece of crap. So far, not much of it works as publicized-- and keep in mind we pay dearly for this service, components of which others offer for free-- and still not one word from Apple to its loyal customer base.

We're tired of paying for what is essentially a beta release filled with bugs.

Sorry folks, you are wrong. It is NOT working smoothly.

I'm in the UK and switched to iPhone a few months ago - having used Palm Treo phones for some years - and wasn't very impressed. How could Apple have overlooked giving iPhone the ability to forward text messages (even the cheapest phone can do that)? And why do I have to go to a website to view pictures that are sent as attachments to text messages (again, this isn't necessary with other phones)? Despite these very irritating oversights, I decided to stick with iPhone. When the G3 model was announced, I tried repeatedly to get-in my order, via the O2 website, but missed the boat. My local O2 store had only a couple of dozen handsets available and there was a queue a mile long. I've been unable to download iPhone 2.0, depite spending hours and hours and hours trying to do so. At one point, I got 205MB (of 218MB) downloaded before it bombed out. How annoying is that? Even if I had downloaded 2.0, it seems that further problems were potentially in store for me. Every aspect of this G3/2.0 launch has been a complete and utter fiasco. Apple's attitude seems to me to be smug and cavalier. Their contempt for their customers could not be more obvious. Their lack of proper preparation for the onslaught that they knew was coming beggers belief. And now, almost a week after the launch, absolutely nothing's changed nor improved. I, for one, will not be keeping my iPhone and I hope that thousands and thousands of other customers will do likewise and send to Apple the clearest possible message about what we think of the firm and the way it treats its customers.

Oh please - stop defending them folks. You prepare for this.This isn't some fly by night company. Somebody should be fired. This is the fourth time in a week I can't get my e-mail. I want somebody's head on a spike. MobileMe stinks. I am insulted by their attempt to bribe me.

I won't get into how ridiculous it is that the iphone doesn't have copy/paste or search functions- so when the new iphone came out, instead of getting it immediately, I waited. I have declined to get it since without those features, I really can't justify the purchase. But what makes me even more furious is that since Friday I have been unable to receive any email on my .mac account. After several calls to apple support, and waiting for over an hour for their online chat support to respond to me, I am still left without any answers- other than that they are sorry but the servers are having issues. Gee, really? Thanks for the insight. This is pathetic. I find it hard to believe that a computer company can't anticipate the traffic that their servers would face. I bet they didn't run out of iphones to sell. It's really, really f*cked up that a customer such as myself, who didn't upgrade to a new iphone, who didn't sign up for mobileme, who changed nothing, gets monkey-wrenched like this.

NO EMAIL ACCESS THROUGH MOBILE ME SINCE FRIDAY JULY 18th AT 10:00am. Here is the "chat" I had this morning at 9:00 with mobileme support. NO END IN SIGHT!

Here is my chat at 9:00am

*

Hi, my name is Craig. Welcome to Apple!
*

Craig: Good Morning, Elizabeth.
*

Elizabeth Forrester: I have had no email access for 4 days
*

Craig: I'm very sorry to hear that, Elizabeth. Give me just a moment to look up your account.
*

Elizabeth Forrester: no mail though mail app, iphone, or me.com. when I log in i see a blank gray page
*

Craig: Unfortunately, after reviewing your account, it looks like your account is part of a small group of customers experiencing a temporary outage in mail service with MobileMe. I know it's been a few days and it is frustrating. I'm in the same boat as you, my mail hasn't been up for four days either.
*

Craig: Apple is working hard and has made this issue their number one priority. We expect the issue to be resolved soon.
*

Elizabeth Forrester: when is this going to corrected?? 4 DAYS is RIDICULOUS! This is my only email acct. I depend on this for work. I just got a gmail acct this morning. and after checking the discussion pages it's unlikely a "small amount" of customers
*

Elizabeth Forrester: what is the issue?
*

Craig: We are experiencing a temporary issue with one of our mail servers. I'm sorry that is affecting you as well. I know how frustrating it is to be without mail.
*

Elizabeth Forrester: what's frustrating is the lack of response. Since Friday I've been told that it will be resolved soon. I'm very disappointed and beyond frustrated at the lack of communication and acceptable time frame for it to be resolved. so we just need to it and wait- possibly for days?
*

Elizabeth Forrester: thanks craig. i'll make sure everyone of the other "small amount" of customers knows that there is no end in sight.
*

Craig: Unfortunately, I don't have any thing else to tell you besides asking you to wait. I don't know any more about the issue and a resolution time than I've told you. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.
*

Elizabeth Forrester: Me too. One loyal apple customer is now gone.

8th day without email service, I guess that sums my story up...

I love my iphone but cannot believe that it won't allow me to send or receive simple text photos!! Even my old Motorola Razr could do that... Logging on to a third party website to do this is a royal pain in the butt, I just don't get it!