Yes, I’d like to order an iPhone 3G to go please
Some might say this tool would have been useful, ooooh, about two and a half months ago. Now that the lines have cleared and customers can get in and out of Apple Stores fairly quickly with a shiny new iPhone 3G in hand, Apple has gone live with its online sales tool just like we predicted. Apple’s new online purchasing tool let’s customers select and pay for a new iPhone with a service plan from the comfort of an internet connection, and then head down to a local Apple Store to pick it up and activate it. Think of it as the next generation of Chinese takeout, only you end up with a new phone instead of some tasty Moo Shu. No, it’s not the at-home activation we’ve been waiting for but at least by using this option you’ll be minimizing the time spent in your local Apple Store. As everyone knows, the odds of you spending money on a sweet new MacBook Pro despite the fact you definitely don’t need it increase by 3% for every minute you spend standing there gawking at it.
Ok this is about as dumb as ordering pizza online.
Now the chance for identity theft has now increased.
What’s wrong with ordering Pizza online? They don’t get the order wrong, you don’t have sit on hold while they fend off 100,000 phone calls and you don’t have to try to talk to the perma-stoned high-school dropout. I call that a win-win situation.
Of course the Apple solution is 77 days late and $100 short. They could of did that from the getgo. Go online a week before the phone is release and pre-order one and secure it via a credit card and select the store closest to you and then on launch day you know how many phones to send to each store. You go in, wait on a MUCH smaller line and pick up your phone.
Hell! Have it online to order, ship it out directly to you and put a $500 hold on the Credit Card until the phone is activated on iTunes for ATT or O2 or whatever you use. No line, no fuss. Damn, that was easy. Your welcome Apple.
see no problem with ordering online whether its iphones or pizza.
hey madmike, why are you always so hostile? and it’s “you’re” not “your”
Wow! seems to me that iphone comes out with gayer and gayer shit daily!!!
*yawn* so apple continues to be “innovative” and clever with it’s marketing of the iPhone. With the ability to order EVERYTHING ELSE from apple and have it UPS’d this is just another ploy to drum up exactly this kind of hype for their product. Once you get beyond the “wow this phone is different from my RAZR” reaction you soon realize the phone is just that. a phone. Yes it has some neat-o apps and can even be your iPod, but really… it’s just hype-tasticizing apple phanboys that drool for this garbage.
I hope they don’t revive that idiotic in home activation bullshit. I hate to contemplate the hours of my life wasted by sitting on the phone with some fucktard who can’t figure out how to install itunes on their computer or can’t get it to activate because their computer is stoned out of its mind with antivirus and consumer firewall apps. The in home activation system was a disaster and that is why it was done away with in the first place. i can state first hand that customers are much happier having a working device in their hand when they leave the store. God forbid they actually have to interact with a sales rep.