CUPERTINO, Calif. (Reuters)—Apple’s new iPhone, the all-in-one cell phone, iPod, GPS device and web browser, promises to draw hoards of people to AT&T retail outlets this Friday.
Though few details have been disclosed about the distribution of the phones, or if there will in fact be enough available to satisfy consumer demand in the first week, Apple insists that anyone interested must show up at either an Apple Store or an AT&T store this Friday at exactly 6:00 PM. No online reservations or preorders have been offered to anyone, regardless of status or connections. Not even top-level executives closely tied to the product’s development have been able to get special treatment.
Especially eager to get his hands on an iPhone, mac fan and Apple Chief Executive Offer Steve Jobs took to the streets yesterday to secure a place in line, no doubt hoping to walk into the workplace on Monday with a cool new toy to show everybody.
“I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time,” said Jobs from inside his iTent, set up roughly one block and about three dozen customers away from an AT&T service center. “Ever since I introduced that thing at Mac World eight months ago I knew I had to have one. Did you see how you can scroll through music and video just by waving your finger across the screen? That’s so cool! Or how about checking your voicemail with a graphic interface? I doubt after using that I could ever go back to this LG 540 I bought last year. Yeah, this things sucks ass; I can’t wait to get rid of it.”
Jobs then angrily chucked his phone in the tent, resplendently aware that he would soon not have to settle for its boring physical keypad or inability to contain 10 gigabytes of streaming video.
“I didn’t expect there’d be this many people here already, though. For Christ’s sake, we’ve still got about 72 hours to go. All the blog posts on Mac News said there probably wouldn’t be any gathering crowds until Thursday afternoon. It’s a good thing this place is in the same strip mall where I rent videos, otherwise I might not have noticed the line.”
According to reports, Jobs simply failed to realize he’d have to resort to curbside camping for his iPhone after giving the order to his regional sales heads that he didn’t want to distribute any units over the web beforehand, preferring instead to create a spectacle out of the thousands of people that would undoubtedly show up on June 29th to get one in person.
“Man,” Jobs chortled, “I can’t believe I did that… I always do stuff like that. I guess I didn’t think of myself as a consumer at the time. It seemed like a cool marketing idea when I told everyone to do it. Guess I didn’t realize I’d be one of the people who couldn’t get one. Now I’m kicking myself that I didn’t just pocket that prototype model I pulled out for the Keynote speech. It’s okay though, I’m just glad to be right here, 67th or so in line.”
When asked if Jobs couldn’t perhaps send someone to take his place in line while he went back to work as the head of his $36 billion international computer corporation, he replied, “Well I guess I could do something like that, but this just seemed like the cheapest way to get one. It’s like I’ve got a really rigid schedule or anything. I mean, I started looking around on Ebay for one of these last week, and they were selling for like eight or nine hundred bucks—that’s a little out of my price range.”
[Thanks: http://secondsupper.com]
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