Apple Mac HQ

What a day it has been for iPhone owners new and old across the United States. At 8AM in each time zone across the United States, the iPhone 3G was in the hands of Apple fans. And for some of them, the phone actually made calls. For countless others however, they left AT&T or Apple stores with an expensive paper weight.

Unless you’ve been underground for much of the day today, I’m sure you heard that Apple and AT&T had some “issues” with iPhone activations. In fact, that story is the headline story on CNN.com as I type this.

In addition to the activations by those buying the new iPhone 3G, anyone updating the 1st generation phone to iPhone 2.0 Software also had to reactivate their phone as part of the upgrade process. Can you guess the approximate time that the iPhone 2.0 Software was officially released? Yep, about 8AM EDT. But wouldn’t that make 6 million iPhone available for updating at the same time the entire East Coast was beginning their iPhone purchases? Why yes it would.

As you might have guessed, Apple ran into some problems. In fact, my iPhone experience went something like this:

9:15AM – “Oh, software 2.0 is out, I can update my 1st Gen iPhone now”.
9:45AM – “Sweet, iPhone 2.0 installed”
9:50AM – “This sure is taking a while”
9:55AM – we could not complete your iTunes Store request – error -9838; “That can’t be good”
9:56AM – “Crap, I can’t even use my phone!”
10:10AM – Ok, mass iPhone activation problems at home and at AT&T and Apple stores
1:15PM – “I should try again”
1:45PM – “OK, I’m giving up until I hear for sure that someone has actually gotten their phone activated”
4:15PM – “Zonks, my iPhone is activated and restoring from backup!”

So all total, about 7 hours of having an iBrick. I guess it could have been worse right? Not sure how but….ok, time for bed.