Apple Store Down. Verizon iPhone Coming | Hacker News Reader

Apple Store Down. Verizon iPhone Coming

store.apple.com

22 pointsdawsdesign12 comments

Why does Apple always take their entire online store down whenever they do product updates? It must cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in lost sales every time.

Does it? Buying something in Apple’s online store is not like buying your favorite cereal in the supermarket. You are not going to not buy that $500 iPad or that $1700 MacBook Pro because the store was down for a few hours. I don’t think you can look at the average hourly revenue of the online store, look at how long it was down and calculate Apple’s revenue loss from that.

Only the super-rich can afford to go impulse buying in Apple’s online store (or any store selling expensive stuff).

I don’t think you can look at the average hourly revenue of the online store, look at how long it was down and calculate Apple’s revenue loss from that.

Of course not. But neither can you say that 100% of people will come back after the store turns them away. There is undoubtedly a cost to store downtime; the only question is how much. On a high traffic store like Apple's, even a small percentage of lost customers is a large amount of money lost.

Perhaps the free press generated by every brief downtime more than compensates for it? (that isn't me being sarcastic, it's just a guess)

It probably has more to do with the technology they use than anything. With high scalability comes great pains-in-the-ass to upgrade. ;)

That's true, they use the java based web objects framework.

WebObjects doesn't necessarily mean Java.

Is this the first we've seen of details of the Verizon data plans? I'm a tad disappointed but not surprised that the wifi hotspot is an extra $20/month, not including buying metered bandwidth that's separate from your regular unlimited data plan, and not including some sort of activation fee. (I can only imagine how costly it must be for Verizon for you to switch on a feature baked into the phone's OS)

I'd already preordered it for my mom on the Verizon website. It took about an hour for the CC info to be accepted, they must be getting a lot of the orders.

Store is up. Verizon customers may now upgrade

Actually I'm seeing Apple having communication errors communicating with Verizon so I can't purchase yet....

let the fun begin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com