CINCINNATI, Ohio—Everyone else is covering the iPhone line in budding metropoli (is that a word?) euch as New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago. I hear there were 50+ people in line for the iPhone at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store in downtown Chicago as of 5am. Well, we thought we'd do something different (OK, maybe we had to because we were going to that darn wedding later) and cover iPhone line-waiters in a slightly less popular city... the budding metropolis of Cincinnati, Ohio.
I used to live in Cincinnati, and so I was familiar with the landscape when I arrived. I showed up at Kenwood Towne Center Mall at 7:45am Eastern Time, expecting at least 20 people to be in line. This is what I saw when I got there.
Nobody. The occasional mall-walker. That's it. We stood in line briefly before a security guard came to shoo us away.
"Are you in line for the iPhone, ma'am? The line can't start until 9:00."
By 8:45am, a small crowd formed just five feet away from the entrance. It's a small, displaced line of sorts, and there are Ars readers present.
Somehow, I get the feeling the people of Cincinnati will be able to get iPhones.
At 11:15am, I overhear the guy next to me in line just off the phone with his wife. He told me that he will be buying two now: one for himself, and one for his three-year-old daughter.
By 2:10pm, the line has finally extended far, far down the length of the mall. The last time we counted was about two hours ago, around noon, and the line was at exactly 50 people. By now, that number has crossed 75 at least—pretty big for the 'Nati. The local Apple Store team has just closed the store and to put up signage and black banners.
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Bengals' game sized lines, eh?Jacqui Cheng
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Wait, what?Jacqui Cheng
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Like a reverse Broadway show, as the curtain comes up after the spectacle starts.Jacqui Cheng
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brb, iPhone stuff.Jacqui Cheng
An hour later, and Clint did a quick count: there are currently 92 people in line. Security guards have been coming by to tell people to stand behind a certain square on the tile floor. This is no joke—one guy was standing one square too far, and he got scolded.
At 5:05pm, there's less than an hour to go, and people are getting feisty. The line in Cincinnati has well exceeded 140 by my conservative guess (last count was about an hour and a half ago and the number was 110). The woman next to us is jumping and kicking the air. Apple employees are congregating outside of the store. Personally, I can't wait to stop sitting on the tile floor.
At 5:22pm, Apple employees finally unveil the windows with a countdown on display. They have changed all of the signs inside the store to iPhone signs, changed all of the screen savers, etc. Everything is iPhone, iPhone, iPhone.
Apple employees come out to talk to us. They said that they'll be opening the store in 30 minutes, everybody will get the opportunity to touch the product. But with the crowd that's finally formed—even in Cincinnati, over the course of eight-odd hours—the crew has an additional message. "We highly encourage people interested in buying an iPhone to buy the iPhone first then look around."
-Jacqui Cheng
Part of something bigger
SAN FRANCISCO—By noon, over 200 people were waiting in a line that stretched around the block, a line that showed no signs of tapering off with rationality. Like inmates on death row universally protesting innocence, every single person was sure they were going to get an iPhone. A store employee told me the store was shutting down at 2:00 PM and would reopen four hours later, possibly with barricades and sandbag shotguns ready. This was iDay.
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The line starts here
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Welcome to San Francisco
Right after the initial group of tents came the typical San Franciscans. Whether it's a gay pride parade, or an anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-whatever protest, somebody always shows up in costumes. There were clowns, too. The crowd itself was what you might expect at an Apple Store, mostly white, lots of black t-shirts, not too many goatees though, and only a smattering of berets. Of those buying for themselves, almost everyone I spoke with was already an AT&T customer. Not surprisingly, there were a good number of people waiting in line for someone else.
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The Book of the Elect
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First Hundred in line
As someone who waited in line for a Wii before Christmas, I can tell you that getting on a list made up by some guy in a line is worthless. Nonetheless, all the way back to around the 150th person, everyone knew their number in line. However, expect the number of people in line to inevitably swell right before the Apple Store employees begin putting the mark on palms and foreheads, so there may be a riot, or at least a lot of whining.
What's surprising is that no one has been run over yet. Check out the guy in the middle of the picture leaning back. Of course, if he goes under the bus, everybody moves up a number. While the line was nothing like that for the Keynote for Macworld, it is astonishing to think that this scene is being repeated all over the country. That more than anything else tells you how far Apple has come, or fallen, depending on how one feels about the whole "three-legged table" speech Jobs gave yesterday.
Yeah, people like me, who weren't in line, not them.
No matter how hard I tried to make fun of the people in line, it just didn't work. They were smiling, laughing, even those that had been there all night and really could have used a bath. You could not convince the last in line they weren't going to get an iPhone, or the first that it would not be worth the $500 plus contract. Make fun if you can, but I couldn't because they were part of something that I wasn't today.
We few, we happy few, we band of iBrothers;
For he to-day that waits in line with
be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And those in phone contracts now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their Windows Mobile devices cheap whiles any speaks
That stood with us upon iPhone day.
-Charles Jade
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