i(phone) shoulda known better

after all of the hype about the new iphone 2.0 software, and the app store, and all the goodies awaiting me, i went to work today having told kirk to update his iphone when itunes showed the update.

usually i’m pretty sensible about these things. if yesterday you had asked me what to do, i probably would have told you to wait to update. make sure everything is working properly. give it a day or two. but i got caught up in the hype. i figured that as important as this was to apple, and as much as they had advertised and flogged this new phone + new software, they would have their act together. i assumed that updating our original iphone to the new software would be seamless.

boy was i wrong. kirk sat all morning fiddling with this. the last email i got from him seemed to indicate that the phone was updated and activated, but still wouldn’t sync because itunes is still down. so i’d guess that he has a working phone, with no contact info etc. on it. which apparently is better than some people.

should i have obeyed my common sense and told kirk to wait? you bet.

should apple have hyped this new phone + new software to the moon and back, like they did? you bet.

should apple have been technically ready for this onslaught, the one they created? you bet.

will this be a non-issue tomorrow? i’d guess so. i certainly hope so.

look. it ain’t a pacemaker that we’re talking about. small children will not lose their lives because the iphones won’t update smoothly. but it irks me that, due to apple’s lack of preparation, kirk wasted the morning of his day off, and probably still hasn’t finished syncing the phone. lots of people are angry about this, and it’s because a) apple markets themselves as the easier technological alternative, which amplifies their missteps, and 2) people love their damn iphones and are pissed when they suddenly don’t work.

hopefully it will be fixed by tomorrow, because he’s leaving for reading, pa for sunday and monday, and it would be nice if he had a working phone to take with him.

update: took my 2:00PM afternoon constitutional, which just happens to take me right past the action. at the at&t store at 54th & 6th, there was a security guard at the door letting people in a few at a time, and ~50 people in line. said security guard was getting yelled at by an extremely old man clutching an iphone who couldn’t connect to itunes. security guard nonplussed. at the flagship apple store on 58th and 5th, a few hundred people in line, stretching around the corner and down 58th by fao schwartz. calm and orderly — i think the store may have been closed to all but iphone shoppers, but i’m not sure about that.

update 2: kirk just called. from his fully functioning iphone. that has all the contacts and info loaded on it. perfectly normal. what’s the big frigging hullabaloo?