AT&T Stops taking iPhone 4 Pre-Orders | Hacker News Reader

AT&T Stops taking iPhone 4 Pre-Orders

usatoday.com

13 pointsjason_slack21 comments

I had so many troubles yesterday with placing my order.

Today, I see my bank account has been debited the wrong amount from the invoice. I called AT&T and they say not to worry about it, they didn't communicate the order total properly.....

When you take way more money than you invoice, I see a problem in that...They offered me a $29 credit after activation....

The AT&T site wasn't calculating tax yesterday or the extra "phone tax" if you're in CA. You are probably being charged up to $100 more than what they said the total was.

If the reports are true, and iPhone 4 has generated over 10 times the pre-orders that 3GS did, then I don't think you can fault AT&T or Apple a whole lot for the screw-ups yesterday, or for the lack of inventory (the supposed AT&T data exposure excepted). I would have predicted 2, maybe 2.5 times, but 1000%? That's unheard of.

AT&T suspended iPhone 4 pre-orders Wednesday after demand overwhelmed inventory.

Really? Are they incapable of predicting demand after four versions of the phone, or are they unable to manufacture enough even though they knew demand would be high?

Or are they just artificially limiting supply?

The last option seems the most likely.

Why?

The cellular/mobile phone industry in the US is probably THE worst when it comes to treating customers like customers, instead of assets. When you actually value customers through a four letter acronym (look it up/do the research if you're unfamiliar with ARPU), it's not entirely unlikely that there are things in motion behind the scenes to drive up demand artificially, while on the books companies like AT&T and Verizon (the latter of which has a well documented history of locking built-in features out of phones in order to extract a premium fee from their use by customers-see below) look squeaky clean.

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http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Verizon-Wireles...

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/verizon-locks-ou...

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161019/verizon...

http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/want-droid-work-e-mail-i...

http://www.pencomputing.com/wireless/motorolav710.html

I doubt they need to artificially limit supply anymore for such an established product like iPhone (even iPad supplies weren't that limited).

My guess is #2 - Apple wants to release the product as soon as possible to be as far ahead of the competition as possible. Thus, the time between the finalization of the product specs (after all engineering has been done) and the launch date will be kept pretty tight. They'll make all they can in that time, and then sell what they have on launch day.

AT&T has no reason (other than network capacity) to limit supply. AT&T definitely has no reason to have their servers go down under signups, giving further impression and bad PR of capacity handling problems.

What AT&T does have is IT management who use Blackberries, and still think a smartphone is defined by its technical feature set.

With iPhone technical feature set comparing poorly (in conventional tech opinion) to Android, and with Android beating iPhone sales the past few months (ignoring that iPhone buyers might be waiting for v4), it's "inconceivable" (AT&T's actual word) that people really want iPhone that much.

AT&T is genuinely confused by this.

What's not to like? If they under-prepare, the worst that happens is they get all kinds of press on how hot the product is. If they over-prepare, they just waste money. Seems to happen repeatedly -- Jobs & co. are too smart just to keep underestimating demand all the time. And this coming from a company that always issues extremely low earnings guidance....

I hope Apple is getting fistfuls of cash from AT&T.

From the failed WWDC demo (couldn't activate cell data) to the leaked iPad emails to the iPhone preorder, I can't imagine Jobs + co are too pleased with the negative brand impact AT&T is bringing to Apple.

Alternatively, I hope Apple is furious, and working as hard as they can to get iphones on other carriers. While I'm sure the exclusivity made the initial release easier for Apple, a lot of customers are waiting to get an iphone on a different carrier.

The way they have things set up, it's going to be hard for them to keep their generous deal with AT&T intact while opening the iPhone up to other carriers. The second the iPhone is available elsewhere, Apple loses a lot of the leverage that got AT&T to pay the iPhone's huge subsidy.

You can bet that if Apple could negotiate terms with a second carrier that would increase their profits, they would be all over that. I suspect they're having a hard time finding a generous enough offer to compensate for a weakened deal with AT&T.

Apple shoulders significant blame in this colossal mess. They knew the iPhone 4 would be huge and obviously failed to do (potentially forcing AT&T's hand) sufficient integration and load testing for this order process. Apple should've known the limits beforehand and had measures in there to throttle the process. Better to get a "Try again later" than to get to random screens and error and keep trying for hours on end.

I thought the WWDC demo failed because they couldn't get on the WiFi, not on the 3G. I might be wrong though.

No, you're right -- they were trying to use WiFi, but when he switched to the backup phone, there was an error displayed about not being able to activate the cellular data. The audience laughed, Jobs brushed it off, and the demo went on.

Thanks for the clarification.

I tried all day yesterday to order. After maybe 30 attempts at going through the buy process on Apple's site, I got to the final page of it and it said it had to ship to my AT&T billing address. Which happens to be wrong now. For the rest of the day I tried to log into AT&T's site to change it. I was never able to. Now trying to log in on it gives me a 404.

I'm an app developer, and I need the phone for testing as soon as possible.

Update. I got one ordered. It will arrive by July 19. I predict we'll get deluged with negative reviews.

It sucks that Apple's secrecy makes it difficult for legit third-party developers to have access to proper testing hardware and infrastructure so their apps, which Apple touts as one of the reasons to have an iPhone, are ready to go on the day of release.

We've got it working in the simulator, but the device is always different. For instance, before the iPad there were four possible device orientations. Landscape left and right, and upright left and right. They added two, face down and face up. So any code that if blocked between the original four broke. A lot of apps were thrown by that when they got the device.

It's really bothersome that so many people I know were unable to upgrade their older phones yesterday. Now they'll have to wait for (presumably) months, while the fanboy wankers who already have the latest phones pay full price to be the first guy in their neighborhood bar to stare at a retina display, instead of talking to women.

I know this will never happen, but it would be a thoughtful gesture toward customer loyalty if AT&T were to give priority access to the latest hardware by contract age, instead of just creating a free-for-all scramble on pre-registration day.

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