Monday: iPhone Supply Constrained

Apple gave more than adaquate warning that there would probably NOT be enough supply immediately available to meet demand. That’s why I avoided the Apple stores and waited until minute after the things were available on the online store, and ordered two 8GByte models, one for me, and one for my wife.

They came Friday and were initialized that night. No real problems, save one . . . if you’re going to register multiple phones for the family plan and some of them will be scavenging old numbers from existing accounts, register the ones that will require NEW numbers FIRST, as registering a pre-existing phone, even if you told it you were going to initialize multiple phones under the family plan, seems to sometimes terminate the registration session without allowing you to finish, essentially requiring you to create another family plan account to continue the registration. Fortunately if this happens to you, it’s easy to get AT&T to fix it, or even change the randomly assigned numbers to new phones to ones more compatible with your existing setup. For instance I was given an area code for the neighboring county because the city I live in straddles two counties. They fixed my area code, changed my prefix to be the same as my wife’s, and they had available a really easy to remember “last 4″ that I know I won’t forget, as opposed to the originally assigned number of which I can only remember the area code.

I’d say for a first release for a new cell phone provider, the iPhone is a hit totally out of the ballpark. Over a half million already in people’s hands and activated, and more coming into the US every day. (mine is number 550,000 or so, as there is a simple way of figuring out how many have been made from one of the internal numbers in the “Settings” section. Assuming Apple doesn’t shuffle the deck after the first million have hit the streets.

And, if someone REALLY has to have one right away, there are about 600 left for sale up on eBay going from alittle over cost to alittle under, and the “original owner” isn’t the person who buys the device, but rather the person that first activates it, since until then it’s just a shiny hunk of metal, plastic, and glass.

Appropriately the box they ship it in reminds you more of a jewelry box than a cell phone box. It’s a work of art in itself, and I plan to keep mine so that long after I’ve retired my original phone in favor of an enhanced model, I can keep the original as a museum piece. Particularly after Apple starts distributing in Europe and Asia they are going to be selling these things by the tens of millions every quarter for awhile.