Not the Kind of Press They Wanted

As most technologically-aware folks are probably, well, aware, Apple released 4 major products last Friday. Let's just say things did not go smoothly, and I think they got a more than a little over-ambitious. My co-workers and I were talking about this on Friday, since most of us are Mac users, and I said that I thought Apple should have rolled out MobileMe, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone OS 2.0 upgrade, and registering all those phones over, say, a 2 week period to minimize the potential to fuck things up. It seems that Macworld magazine agrees with me: 

Well, Friday was certainly memorable—I’ll give Apple that.

We’ll just have to speculate on what Apple’s rationale was for launching everything at once, because the company isn’t making any public pronouncements other than to crow about the number of iPhones sold via press release. (It's the company’s favorite way to communicate with the outside world—after all, no one can ask a press release potentially uncomfortable questions.)

Apple should certainly be proud of the fact that it sold a million iPhone 3Gs in the device’s first weekend—but how about a word or two of appreciation for the patience of the folks who endured a tremendous amount of inconvenience to enable Apple to hit that mark? And while we’re at it, maybe Apple could also reassure its customers that it will look into what went wrong on Friday so that it will minimize the chances of repeating those mistakes at future product launches.

I realize Apple probably wanted to make a big media splash by rolling all this out at once, but they got more than they bargained on when first the MobileMe transition didn't go right. Then everything went downhill from there. I don't think the media splash that did get made is quite what Apple had in mind. 

Apple will eventually get this all sorted out. The iPhone activation issues have gone away as I write this, and most of the people that I know with iPhones have successfully upgraded to the iPhone OS 2.0. I just hope they get the MobileMe SNAFUs sorted out sooner rather than later.