My Marvelous Adventure Picking Up a Pre-ordered iPhone 7
So there I was. I had my printed email for an iPhone 7 that I pre-ordered on September 9th. It said to be at the Park Meadows Mall Apple store between 0900 and 0930 on September 16th.
What I expected, based on last year’s experience, was to be invited into the store on arrival and shortly assigned a sales person who would conduct the transactions: trading in an old iPhone 6s for store credit and doing all those administrative things for the new iPhone 7. That includes a final test of calling my wife’s iPhone to make sure the AT&T deactivation of the 6s and activation all went smoothly on the new iPhone.
Last year, as I recall, I had to wait briefly in a short line outside the store at my scheduled arrival time. After I met my sales agent, it took about 30 minutes and I was out the door.
This Year’s Experience
I arrived at 0901 and quickly found the Apple concierge standing in the concourse. I showed him my printed email, but instead of directing me to a line in front of the store, I had to wait in a side concourse, about 75 meters from the (new) store, just opened, further down the concourse. There were two lines.
My line had seven people in front of me, the pre-order line. Next to us, separated by banker’s ropes were the walk-ins. All of us in the pre-order line, which grew to about 10, waited about 40 minutes before anything happened. I asked about that.
It turns out, according to a manager, that customers who were in the iPhone Upgrade Program were invited in early, and those transactions were taking a lot longer than expected. It produced a slow-down.
Disneyland Line
But once a group of five in front of me had been moved to the front of the store, it was time for three more of us to move to that second line right in front of (the glorious, new) store. A second line! There, we waited another 15 minutes or so. About 10:05 am, I was greeted by my sales agent and escorted into the store. I have to say, this woman was amazing, well trained, courteous and efficient. It was a joy to work with her.
We worked at a table like this. The new store is one of 36 with this new design.
Activation
Once we started working with each other, things went smoothly. But there was an awful lot of administrative detail and multiple presentations of my driver’s license.
- Find my order in the system.
- Verify my identity with driver’s license.
- Scan the 6s IMEI and verify that I’m the owner.
- Deactivate Find my iPhone.
- Inspection of the 6s exterior. (Memory doesn’t play into the value.)
- Determine that I got full trade-in value. US$275.
- Deactivate the 6s on AT&T.
- Buy Apple Care Plus.
- Credit the balance (Trade-in less AppleCare) back to my credit card. Apple Pay worked on my Apple Watch!
- Master Reset that erases the 6s. (Actually makes all the encrypted data useless by erasing the master password from effaceable memory.)
- Open the new iPhone 7 box.
- Register it by scanning the new IMEI. More inspection of driver’s license.
- Turn on the 7. Activate on AT&T. Step though a minimal setup, pending restore from backup when I return home. (That took the longest.)
- Make that test phone call.
Everything went smoothly, but as you can see there are a lot of steps. ( I don’t think I even listed them all from memory.) My salesperson, however, was remarkably efficient and experienced with her handset. There was no pain here, just steady progression in a fixed sequence.
I was out of the Apple store at about 10:45. In chatting with one of the store managers on the concourse, I could see that they were all doing everything possible to get us moved through, but the process was initially a bit delayed. I was somewhat annoyed that this process took a total of 1h:45m, but at least it was a fun, pleasant and well-managed transaction. I had a chance to chat with lots of customers.
Notes on the Line
When I arrived at 0901, there were eight of us in the pre-order line and about 50 in the walk-in line. I’ve seen much longer lines for iPhone launches.
When I left at 10:45, things had reversed. The line for those who had pre-ordered was about 50, thanks to the earlier delays, but the walk-in line was only about a dozen. I concluded that people learned quickly that they wouldn’t be able buy the iPhone they wanted and went home or back to work.
Another thing I learned from a manager is that early arriving walk-ins were given a selection sheet. They could reserve an iPhone right there and then from available stock. If they stayed there and didn’t leave the line, that selected iPhone would be guaranteed. I think some people didn’t see what they wanted on that “pick from today’s inventory” list and left.
In my discussions with people in line, the two blacks were the most popular color.
On my way out, I asked some of the people in the walk-in line why they didn’t pre-order. I was expecting most to say that they weren’t aware of that option. I was wrong. Everyone I talked to knew about the pre-order opportunity on the 9th. The reasons I got were 1) I wanted to come to the store myself 2) I was out of the country last week, 3) I had to work, 4) I had something to do that morning and didn’t want to be up late and 5) I had some finances to work out and had to be here in person.
Recommendation
The process of certifying that you’re the legitimate owner of the trade-in, all the “paperwork” and the activation of a new phone by the identified purchase/Apple ID takes a lot of time. I know Apple thinks about this, and I’d be pleased if the process could be sped up.
Alert readers will note that I forgot to include AppleCare Plus in my initial pre-order, but that didn’t take long to complete in the store. 30 seconds. Laser scan the barcode on the box. Done.
I think that the biggest annoyance was that I was given a time window to arrive and expected to be ushered into the store in that window. Logistics and unexpected delays in the Upgrade Program foiled that plan, delaying me by about an hour. My wife was with me, for fun, but she was visibly annoyed by the delay. She wandered off to have coffee and shop.
I hope next year goes as quickly as 2015 did.
Next page: The Tech News Debris for the Week of September 12th. The computational dominance of mobility.
Page 2 – The Tech News Debris for the Week of September 12th
The Computational Dominance of Mobility
This year’s iPhone 7 Pluses: Rose Gold, Gold, Silver, Black, and Jet Black. (Image credit: Apple)
We know the iPhone is 64-bit and fast. But the dominance of certain technologies has put a premium on computational performance in a mobile environment. That includes encryption, Apple Pay, camera image processing, facial recognition, motion tracking, fingerprint recognition and all kinds of things that a desktop computer, or even notebook, typically isn’t tasked to do.
This very thorough article at The Verge explains how the requirements of extreme smartphone mobility are threatening Intel. See: “The iPhone’s new chip should worry Intel.” One section points out, with respect to the Geekbench score of the A10 Fusion:
The A10 chip inside the iPhone 7 comfortably outpaces its predecessors and Android rivals, and even outdoes a wide catalog of relatively recent Mac computers (including the not-so-recent Mac Pro). The iPhone’s notoriously hard to benchmark against anything else and this is just one metric, but it’s illustrative of Apple’s accelerating momentum and mobile focus.
And that brings up a natural question. Is there a class of desktop activities that would benefit from these tremendous advances in computational power? Or is the usage profile of the desktop/notebook doomed to always be a second class computational citizen compared to mobility, falling further and behind? It’s something to think about.
One class of desktop activities that comes to mind is extreme computation for science and engineering. An astrophysicist friend of mine ponders the idea of 128 or 256 A10 processors set up in a massively parallel computational engine on the desktop. Such a super Mac would be, perhaps, a cubic foot in volume and provide supercomputer power far beyond what we’re accustomed to on the desktop. The performance might be a good fraction of a petaflop. Of course, there are many technical and marketing details to attend to, but it remains an exciting thought.
Related
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More Debris
We are interested in Tesla because we think that Apple might be building an electric car. Tesla’s affordable Model 3 won’t be available until late 2017 at the earliest, but later this year you’ll be able to buy a Chevy Bolt with the same range, about 240 miles. Road Show at CNET liked this new Bolt a lot. “Testing the Chevy Bolt’s real range in the real world by driving it like a real car.” I’ve always kept my eye on this car, written about it, and I think it’s going to be a winner.
Chevy Bolt. Image credit: GM/Chevrolet.
Along those lines, The Verge took a ride in Ford’s autonomous car.
Unlike the rite of passage of becoming a student driver, taking a ride in an autonomous car means mean putting your life in the hands of the machine. But in actuality, riding in Ford’s well-behaved self-driving car was an unremarkable experience. Ford has programmed its cars to drive in a manner one might expect from a nervous student driver.
Things are moving fast. All the car makers are in top gear with their technology. Apple must feel like it’s racing to keep up and confronted with a myriad of major engineering tasks. I surmise that Apple’s inexperience in the automotive market is now coming home to roost.
It looks like Sony has stumbled with its 4K/UHD Blu-ray player. This not the player we were looking for, according to CNET
I’ll be researching these players in the coming months, especially with regard to HDR and studio support for HDR and Dolby Vision on 4K/UHD Blu-ray players. As will everyone else as we approach the December holidays. Why? 4K compression during streaming won’t provide the full exploitation of the 4K/HDR experience that a physical disc can.
Apple tends to keep its product lines relatively simple compared to other companies. A confusing line of products makes it hard to choose, and a wrong, confused choice can lead to buyer’s remorse. But maybe that doesn”t apply with carrier wireless plans. See: “Mobile phone plans: When marketing goes too far.” Alert. Your head will hurt after reading this.
Finally, here’s a fascinating story and theory about why Apple replaced the mechanical Home button on the iPhone 7. I had never heard of this phenomenon (and theory) and assumed that Apple just wanted to eliminate a mechanical failure mode. But this article digs into something completely different. And astounding. “iPhone 7 release: Home button may have been removed because people in Asia don’t press it…”
Simply amazing.
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Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the TMO headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holidays.
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