Activation Problems in iPhone Paradise 434
Thomas Hawk writes "Unfortunately it appears that some activations of Apple's new iPhone have gone badly. After waiting in line 36 hours I'm still unable to activate my phone. I'm documenting the AT&T circus call by call on my blog. I've had my hold calls dropped, been patched into other users unable to activate their phone instead of AT&T customer service reps, been told that my wife must get a new phone and that the family plan can't work for me. I've been told that the problem is that I'm not putting a new chip into my iPhone in the slot on the left side of my phone when no slot there exists. PR Blogger Steve Rubel has also been documenting his problems on his Twitterstream. According to an unscientific poll being conducted by Engadget about half of the people who bought iPhones have had activation trouble with about 38% of problems still unresolved." Even the folks at MacWorld weren't immune to these issues.
Never saw it coming! (Score:3, Insightful)
Never saw it coming.
Especially since AT&T, a company known for shitty service, was given launch rights.
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Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Insightful)
All Apple have done by their move is ensure that anyone buying their phone package is locked into a contract that with the phone costs anywhere upwards of $2000 for two years. That represents absolutely terrible value for money. You really would have to be blinded by the hype to buy an iPhone on those terms. It's an utter waste of money especially considering other technical deficiencies such as lack of 3G. Perhaps a firmware update will fix that issue because there's going to be some severe buyers remorse if an updated model appears with that feature.
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Insightful)
How many GSM providers are nationwide in the USA? AT&T, T-Mobile, anyone else?
They couldnt' set up a service with Verizon Wireless (an example) because they just don't do GSM technology.
It's unfortunate that AT&T is so clueless on this coming out of the gate. I think the iPhone has mind numbing potential. GSM is the right choice if you consider a world wide market, but not for US market, because GSM is more widely used globally. Economy of scale in units manufactured dictate that they go with GSM for a global market.
If you look at the techcentric nations of the world, the United States is not the leading country. We don't have the digital high speed cellular networks or internet broad band speeds of other nations. I just don't think you can safely market a product of this type to only the USA when we have a global market to consider.
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Informative)
GSM coverage in the vast majority of the U.S. (Score:3, Informative)
Western Wireless was acquired [phonescoop.com] by Alltel [alltel.com].
AT&T recently acquired Dobson Communications [prnewswire.com] (which was t
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/30/verizon_t
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:4, Informative)
Because visual voice mail apparently required changes to AT&T's network. I doubt AT&T would've made that commitment if Apple were selling iPhones that could be used on T-moble as well (and vice-versa for T-mobile).
Not true (Score:3, Informative)
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Perhaps you can escape the plan, but does that include an unlock code? Can you even unlock your iPhone?
Perhaps I'm spoilt from living in Europe. Most ~ $60 price plans would get you any p
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Or maybe three if you don't hyphenate it or something =)
I recall a big deal about how Cingular had to make changes on their backend systems to be able to support this feature. The iPhone won't fully work on any system that doesn't have this functionality, and if it's not done exactly the same way, then there will have to be code changes and exceptions for each and every one.
Why exclusive? Call providers like that... it was probably the only way Apple could get one to carry it
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And half the time I try to pay my bill, the system is "temporarily" unav
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Informative)
I have trouble understanding why you were moderated insightful, since publicly available information disproves the second part of your hypothesis.
Total revenue for AT&T first quarter of this year was $28 million compared to $22 million for Verizon and much smaller numbers for others... Leader in market share for wireless at 27.1%
I think the more likely explanation is AT&T is much, much larger than any other GSM provider in the U.S. (As in more than twice as large... subscriber-wise). By far has the most GSM network infrastructure and bandwidth. I think the desperate hurting for money thesis is totally ludicrous.
I'm really interested in more info on what the nature of the activation issue is, so I'm disappointed that all the articles I read on it seem to be Apple fanboys saying "it definitely can't be Apple's fault, must be AT&T." But they don't provide any details... Most GSM phones don't need to be "activated" at all... put a(n appropriate) SIM card in and it works. What happens during activation? And before launch I heard that you'd be able to activate via iTunes at home... What happened to that?
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You're a f*cking lunatic. A six hundred dollar brick you have to haggle over for 14 hours, before it will do anything? That's insane. I'm sorry, but I'd attach the receipt to the damn thing and throw it back through a store window, but that's just me.
Not Surprising (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:4, Insightful)
I played with the iPhone and it is a very cool phone. Just like the iPod, the iPhone interface is extremely intuitive. My only complaint was that I found the onscreen keyboard hard to use. Without any sort of tactile feedback, such as what I get with my current QWERTY keyed phone, I found that I had a lot of mistyped letters on the screen. That would probably be a deal breaker for me, personally.
I really want the iPhone to succeed because it is a cool product with a lot of cool new ideas. The more the iPhone succeeds the better the market on the whole will get, as more and more competitors start including many of the iPhone's features. But I just can't help but wonder if the iPhone will ever be able to live up to its own hype.
*Note: while I refuse to give Cingular any more of my money after the way they treated me before, like a good little geek I did have to play with the demo phones in the store. If the next version of the iPhone is released on a cross-carrier basis and it's a little more reasonably priced, I would probably consider it.
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Certainly, they also chose to go with CMDA, which basically limits them to ATT or T-Mobile, but just about every other phone in the US market seems to be able to produce both a GSM and CMDA version, so why couldn't the iPhone? Producing a couple models of the iPhone that could were sold contract-independent, were sold in the Apple
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But, but but!
Apple's going to fix the entire cell phone industry with the iPhone! Surely they wouldn't have chosen the worst servicing, most predatory monopolist of the cell phone industry to be their partner?
Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Funny)
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It reaches all the way to their headquarters in Malebolge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malebolge)
I would emphasize the "unscientific" aspect (Score:5, Interesting)
I admit not to have much technical knowhow with respec to the inner workings of this process, but I don't imagine it's entirely any one aspect.. AT&T, Apple, etc. It's probably due to the slowness of every vendor involved (those releasing numbers, etc) and the sheer volume of registrations over the last 72hrs.
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But did you consider also the fact that not all the people who have problems will log on to Apple forums to post or vote in the poll ?
Re:I would emphasize the "unscientific" aspect (Score:5, Interesting)
I really don't buy that 'haters' are skewing the poll significantly. It's possible, sure, but... it really comes off as sounding unlikely to me.
That said, there's no way that 33% or more of iPhone customers are having serious activation problems. That would be many, many hundreds of thousands of people. If that were the case, there'd be news stories galore, all over CNN etc. We'd all (not just a few of us) know people who were suffering activation problems.
The OP is certainly correct in this -- it's an unscientific poll that doesn't mean much. Any online poll like that will suffer from selection bias. That bias could be 'haters', but it's much more likely that people having troubles activating are out actively searching for information, and, more likely to find such a poll and, in turn, much more likely to respond to such a poll than people who have the phone perfectly activated and are relaxing and enjoying their phones.
(To the OP, I wanted to see the results and cheerfully answered -- lying -- that I'd had no problems activating my non-existent iPhone. So at least I biased it the other way!)
I'm biased btw, I think the iPhone is nice, but ludicrously overhyped, and anyone who waited a long time in line for it is out to lunch.
But I suspect the OP's experience (2 of 4 phones activating perfectly, one almost perfectly, and the fourth within 24 hours) is par for the course. And, frankly, considering what a mess AT&T's systems are, I think that's an impressive achievement for Apple.
If we took a WAG (wild-assed guess), there are almost certainly thousands of people with serious activation problems. There might even be tens of thousands. A hundred thousand? I doubt it, but perhaps possible. Even at the 100k mark, that'd be one in 15 customers. 6.7%. Considering it's mobiles and AT&T involved, that actually sounds very good to me, though painful for those with problems.
Granted, if there are still many thousands of people with serious problems in several days time, that'd be quite bad.
As someone who isn't an iPhone fan, it looks like a pretty decent launch. Though I still shake my head at those waiting in line.
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http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/07/02/iphone.ap /index.html#cnnSTCText [cnn.com]
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19539747/ [msn.com]
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287638,00.html [foxnews.com]
All linked off their main pages.
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A couple of people, including me, mentioned it in the comments and Engadget should've changed it right away. Just another reason to question blogs as an authentic media source.
i don't think "vast" is the right adjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Replied to those comments, you'll see people who said they would laugh at me/whomever they saw on the street using an iPhone, people calling me stupid/dumb, calling those in lines "emo retards," calling those in line "suckers," etc. Now, most people who choose not to buy an iPhone just do so out of logical choice, and that's the extent of their involvement.. but there most definitely is a vocal minority that feels slighted by Apple.. I really don't know exactly why, but I can say for sure that when I spent $600 a piece on my unlocked Treos (as did many others a few years ago), I don't recall a sizable portion of people calling me retarded/dumb/etc. The fact is a lot of people online have some sort of irrational distaste for the iPhone, and for those that buy it. And I don't believe that 40% of the people who bought the phone so far are still without service (as noted in the poll). I suspect it's in the single digit percentile, which still sucks if you're in that group, but 40% it isn't. I even posted a link to the Apple discussion page that has hundreds if not thousands of relies from people with activation problems.. but Apple is quickly approaching the "million iPhones sold" mark, and I don't imagine that of those million there will be several hundred thousand that take 48+hrs to navigate an activation quagmire. But hey, maybe I'm just lucky in my experiences. Engadget even noted themselves that they've activated 6 iphones without any problems.
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I really don't know exactly why, but I can say for sure that when I spent $600 a piece on my unlocked Treos (as did many others a few years ago), I don't recall a sizable portion of people calling me retarded/dumb/etc. The fact is a lot of people online have some sort of irrational distaste for the iPhone, and for those that buy it.
It's the publicity. The iPhone was hyped up a lot more than treos. Heck, most people have never heard of the treo, but everyone seems to know about the iPhone. The end result is that more people end up wanting them, but since they have decided not to get it for one reason or another, they're mad at you for getting one. See, in their mind, you're ensuring that they will never get one. Since you're helping the iPhone to be successful by buying it, Apple has no motivation to change the iPhone to cater t
Re:i don't think "vast" is the right adjective (Score:5, Informative)
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Link to resolution of problem (Score:5, Informative)
http://thomashawk.com/2007/07/hot-donkey-after-36
Re:Link to resolution of problem (Score:5, Informative)
Oops, you quoted the wrong part, from the comments:
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Re:Never saw it coming! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apple - because things just work! (Score:2, Funny)
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right so you'd think they would have tested this activation thing and gotten it right BEFORE launch. no excuses, it's just piss poor.
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Re:A bit of perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)
When other new huge phones launch, there is often a flurry of activations, and I do believe AT&T has been in the phone business a while.
Let's be honest here. The problem is that this is new in how they're handling activation. Because Apple has a such a large say in this whole process, it suddenly becomes less clear who is responsible for what. You introduce new policies, procedures and hardware at once, you're going to get SNAFUs.
This isn't being a hater, but simply being objective. Apple has done some things rather well, and others not so well. For a company that does claim to have things "just work", they made the activation process more complicated than it needs to be.
Just activate in-store like any other cell phone.
That is having it "just work".
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I really don't think that it helps that maybe several hundred thousand transfers and activations are happening at the same time, basically 6pm ET to 7pm PT. I don't think it happens very often.
Having it done in iTunes on the whole, probably improved the experience for 95%+ of the buyers, otherwise the lines would have taken maybe two or three times longer to finish.
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Then why did 50% of them report problems?
Something doesn't add up right. Anytime I've purchased a phone, it worked when I left the store. I didn't need to do anything else.
Last time I checked, Microsoft got hit with a fine over half a BILLION dollars for bundling their media player. If I want to watch something with the Quicktime codec, Apple bundles iTunes into the Quicktime download, and forces people to download iTunes if you want to activate their phon
Re:A bit of perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but this was a phone launch like no other. I'm not just being the fanboi here. I've never seen a line outside a cellular phone store for anything. (Well, to get tech support at lunch time, maybe...) Cell providers just aren't prepared to handle this kind of burst buying.
Case in point, I got my iPhone at an AT&T store. For each person who bought a phone they sat us down, asked us a few questions, got our payment info, etc. Took about 10 minutes, and they had maybe five sales guys processing customers. From when the line started moving (I was #34 in line) it took about an hour before I was driving away. For contrast, my friends who bought at an Apple store were out in half the time, and there were more customers there than at the AT&T store I went to.
Bottom line, Apple knows how to handle hype generated high volume sales. (They know how to create hype, natch...) The public's never gotten so excited about a cell phone before, so cell providers are unaccustomed to the phenomena. Hopefully they'll learn...
Re:A bit of perspective. (Score:5, Informative)
You think people are having problems now? A Piper Jay analyst said Apple has probably sold a half-million phones this weekend. I waited in line, then once inside the store, paid and had my phone in two minutes. Went to an WiFi-enabled restaurant nearby and was activated in three more, while I had some coffee.
So given that, the Apple store I went to processed an entire line of 200 people in an hour and a half, and I'd saw a quarter of those at least bought two phones.
Now. Picture a half-million people standing in line and having store employees REQUIRED to do all activations, transfers, credit checks, purchases, and all the other garbage usually associated with buying a phone, and now taking 10, 15, or even 20-minutes with each one. Now THAT would have been a disaster.
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1 - You seem to suggest the iPhone is selling out like mad. Funny, countless reports show the phone is still in stock everywhere, not just at the usual AT&T stores, but in Apple stores, and available on the web. For the most hyped-product of the year, it didn't sell out right away. Let's say 20% of the country has AT&T Cingular (which may be generous). Of those, how many are eligible for new phones this minute? Of that group, how many absolutely had to have the iPhone on launch
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Kevin Smith talked about buying one. He didn't wait in line either. Again, he just walked down to the Apple store, walked in, and walked out with one.
If they sold out on launch-day specifically, it was due to an artificially created limited number for that day.
It's only affecting those without enough faith (Score:3, Funny)
Steve needs faithful followers, truly dedicated to Apple's world-changing mission. He doesn't need fair-weathered followers, who criticize him or his wonderful products.
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iPhone sales have either hit a million units already
Link Please.
He has no link, he's pulling numbers out of his ass. The telltale sign is the second half of the sentence you quote, "or they will by the end of the coming week". What he's saying, basically, is "They've either sold a million in a day, or are going to sell a million in six days. He's stating a time span that's variable by half an order of magnitude. He doesn't have numbers. He just knows that a lot of people waited in line to buy. How many phones this means, he has no clue. QED, the one million number is s
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based on what? all the horror stories we are seeing?
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here's your link (Score:2)
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Right now the price/sales ratio is 5 (Morningstar, based on 2006 full year numbers). Revenues were around 19 billion to generate that ratio. So lets say they sell (round numbers) a million phones at 600 each, which would be 600 million in dollars. Lets say that the price/sales ratio is headed back to the historical norm for Apple of below 3. Let alone they fall to more reasonable numbers.
Question: how ma
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Well, I'm happy (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, as of this weekend, I completed the month-long process of upgrading
The Engadget Poll (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Engadget Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we really willing to believe that 13,000 iPhone customers responded to a poll on a tech-nerd website like Engadget? If that's even remotely accurate, that should indicate the high sales rate of the iPhone. But then again, it's similar to the response rate of every other Engadget poll, so it's probably total crap.
For the record, I don't care either way whether or not 38% of customers had activation trouble or not. I don't care whether 100,000 iPhones sold or 2 million did. It's a neat gadget, but my life isn't riding on it.
Badly chosen launch date (Score:5, Insightful)
Lesson: do not launch product that requires extensive customer service at the beginning of a weekend.
The general observation seems to be that activation from a cold start works OK, but anything that requires "number portability" from a previous account may be troublesome. That's no surprise; number portability is usually a mess, because the carriers don't want you to use that Government-mandated feature.
It's still not clear why activation should require a separate computer. Activation via iTunes might be a nice option if you already use iTunes, but it shouldn't be the main route. After all, the iPhone has its very own Internet connection.
gadgets (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like Slashdot has a greater and greater proportion of articles that relate to gadgets (stuff to buy), and fewer and fewer that are about tech developments, science, etc. I'm not bitching about Slashdot, but is it really the case that nerds have become merely watered-down gear-freaks, and no longer employ their mind in the pursuit of knowledge?
Please, oh true nerds, answer my rallying cry!
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I'll admit it: I think fannishness of any st
no problem for me (Score:2)
Re:no problem for me (Score:5, Funny)
how's that lack of tactile feedback workin' out for ya?
Re:no problem for me (Score:5, Funny)
It's ffffffuckin' aaawesommmmme!1!
Re:no problem for me (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as the keyboard, it's one of my favorite parts. Not having used any type of small-form-factor keyboard extensively, after 5 minutes, I was typing far faster than I ever had on a blackberry-style device (which I've played with for similar short periods of time).
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I bought my phone the same time as two friends. One had trouble - he was moving from T-Mobile. He had trouble simply getting his iPhone activated - it took a few hours before he was able to use it. Another day
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iPhone questions (Score:2)
I always felt Cingular made cell phone virtually unuseable. Has AT&T/Cingular massively improved their network in the past year? Is everyone going to end up thinking the iPhone is a
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I always felt Cingular made cell phone virtually unuseable. Has AT&T/Cingular massively improved their network in the past year? Is everyone going to end up thinking the iPhone is awful simply
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Perhaps this has been explained elsewhere, but here seems as good a place as any for me to ask the question: How is Cingular/AT&T not being to be a disaster for Apple. Everyone I know who has had Cingular has been unhappy with their service. The majority end up switching to Verizon and become fairly satisfied.
I always felt Cingular made cell phone virtually unuseable. Has AT&T/Cingular massively improved their network in the past year? Is everyone going to end up thinking the iPhone is awful simply because their service is so bad? Am I missing something?
Thank you.
I'm a current verizon customer and I can't stand them: here's why - I had a RAZR with 1st gen firmware, phone worked well, and I was able to use bluetooth to sync to my powerbook, transfer pix, and transfer mp3 ringtones. I had battery problem and brought the phone into verizon last Oct. they told me they would replace battery (was about $50) and that they would "upgrade" the firmware to improve battery life. Later, I found that bluetooth wouldn't work. I did some googling, and found out that the new firmw
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I just upgraded to a BB Curve and while talking to the person the phone call dropped (on a land line) and she actually called me back to complete the upgrade and when I asked her for the unlock code she found it for me in less than 10 minutes. I was really very impressed.
Incidentally Verizon uses CDMA (or whatever) so their phones work in only a few coun
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good antenna = no dropped calls, better service, everything.
Simple answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Because we hate all cell carriers. We expect to hate the cell carrier.
After activation is complete though, we don't really have to talk to the cell-phone carrier. Then we just have the phone experience, which is great. That's when cell service may start to arise as an issue, but we've also been trained to accept that as a fact of life.
O
We dont care!! (Score:3, Funny)
my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
You cant do anything with the phone until its activated, no ipod, photos, nothing except calling 911. So the wait can be frustrating, and its very hard to get info out of ATT.
"haha, awesome" (Score:2)
The #1 reason I won't buy an iPhone (Score:2)
Have you tried them? And T-Mobile, not so hot. (Score:2)
I have had a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go account for about a year now. Service quality is OK, but not great. However your support experience does not extend to my dealings with them - when I first got the phone I was trying to make a call to T-Mobile to buy the initial minutes for my phone, and they kept dropping me - the most frustrating experience I have ever had via phone. On the tail end, I'm trying to port my ph
No porblmes at all (Score:4, Funny)
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ZOMG! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apple doesn't create a lot of hype for most of their products. The iPhone is one of the first products (in a long while) from them where they did a full advert
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You just aren't the target market.
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no it's not, for $499 it'd want to suck my fat cock 3 times a day
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You, jcr, are fantastic at making up the most fantastic statements with utterly zero evidence to support your point. You admitted yourself you have NO IDEA how many units have been sold ("they've sold a million units already. or they will have in a week." huh?!?), but you've decided they've set a record for the most product sold
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Re:I still don't get it why people want this iPhon (Score:2)
The number 1 thing I would like about the iphone is the full internet browser. I can't stand the stupid "mobile" versions of websites that I get on my phone, they are impossible to navigate, and 99% of the time don't even have 10% of the content of the real site.
It's a complete pain. Hence my phone browsing is limited to a) stock quotes, b) movie times, c) sports scores
Anything more than that, and my phone is useless.
Also, my phone has 128MB of storage f
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I used to click on every PS3 story and complain about it, but then I realised that I was just being a complete wanker, and stopped.
So, h
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Switching can be difficult, but not nearly as bad as getting out of a cell phone contract!