Today is what I usually call Apple Day, marking the day that you can pre-order the new iPhone. Most Apple days have been spent in an office and my constant uplifted mood and excitement as 1pm approaches drives my colleagues mad. If my memory serves me correctly I have ordered on pre-order day since the iPhone 4, the first iPhone with square edges.
It struck me today that it was slightly anti-climatic ordering it in my home alone, even the cat seemed positively uninterested. It’s not that I am not happy about upgrading and the selling of the last years model, I am very happy about it. Although my bank account would disagree having went from healthy to positively anorexic.
It also reminded me that there are no queues for Apple releases now. The pre-order process is even streamlined, you can setup what you want to pre-order with a pre-pre-order link. It takes all the fun out of the reloading of the apple page over and over and over: until the shop re-opens. I am sure that many keyboards have been burnt-out with the constant reloading.
The first time I ever queued for an Apple product was the iPad 2. I sat in outside the apple approved retailer in The Passage in The Hague from 8:30am until the shop opened for selling the new iPad at 6pm. I took a day off work for this endeavour. It seems a little ridiculous now but at the time it was fun, the queue extended about 500m along the extent of the original passage by 2pm. There was a camaraderie about being there and waiting, swapping Apple stories and meeting new people. Even the staff of the shop came out to bring refreshments and the local news came to take pictures of the these Apple evangelists and there dedication to the experience. The Next Boxing Day sale had nothing on this kind of lunacy. By the time 5:55pm came it was positively fever pitch outside the store.
I was the second person in The Hague that day to by the new iPad. There was a lunatic that turned up at 7am, with a foldable chair, a flask, sandwiches and an iPhone to see him through the day. I was, less prepared, but I had good friends that turned up to see my lunacy. They kindly went and bought me some lunch and coffee but they mostly turned up to see that I was serious about queuing. They failed to believe that I was dedicated to queuing all day when I talked about it. Most importantly they kept my place in the queue while I went to the relieve myself!
Many people have asked me why people queued like that for Apple launches. It was mostly that we wanted to be the people that got it on release day and didn’t have to wait for another few weeks until stocks were stable, it was fun. The excitement also stemmed from how many units did the shop get? Did they get ten? Twenty? One hundred? No-one except the shop staff knew and they were giving nothing away before the store opened to start selling, so being in the queue early ensured you got the model that you wanted, the exact colour (black or white) and the amount of memory you wanted (16, 32 or 64 GB). The manager told me the week after that they received 600 units and they sold out well before the queue ended.
The excitement of getting home and peeling the plastic off the box, ever so carefully, using gravity to separate the top of the box from the bottom and seeing that shiny new iPad 2 sitting nestled inside was like Christmas.
Amusingly many commentators online asked why you would want an oversized an iPhone? No one at the time really knew what it was going to do that an iPhone couldn’t do. It seems ridiculous now, Apple basically opened a whole new category that many others followed (poorly) because of how much you could do with it. Just like the iPhone, is was the application developers that took hold and ran creating applications that cover almost every sector of business, engineering teaching and medicine, as well, of course, as gameplay.
A few years later when the iPhone 7 Plus came out I ordered it online from my apartment in The Hague. I then took my usual stroll into town for coffee. By this time there was a ‘real’ Apple store in The Passage and there was a queue for the new phone. One of my friends saw me and asked quizzically why I wasn’t in the queue. As it was still early I asked myself the same question and decided to join the line as it wasn’t that long anyway. It was not as exciting this time as the staff came along the line every so often when new people queued up to ask which device you wanted and the specifications. They would look up their device and let you know there and then if it would be possible to get it. They would then print off a ticket that ensured you got your new iPhone, you could even leave the queue and come back later. The excitement of that was not palpable. The efficiency of modern day life kind of takes the fun out of some things.
Still, it is Apple Day for me, and the child inside me waits for delivery day next Friday.