My 32GB iPhone 4 is Preordered

Is yours?

I don’t remember having this much trouble last year when I bought my 3GS but this was certainly what I would label an “ordeal” … if there ever were such a thing.

It’s just a preorder, right? How bad could it be? That bad.

It seems the iPhone 4 went live in the Apple.com store around 4am ET this morning and apparently from then on, Apple’s and AT&T’s servers both just bent over and gave up. Both sites were up and down most of the morning. So much so that when I woke up at 7am and tried to order (unaware they were already up 3 hours earlier), I got the usual “Apple store is down” post-it note. I assumed they just hadn’t gone live yet (most people were expecting 8am ET).

A little bit after I got to work I had been periodically checking apple.com and the store finally opened again around 8:30am. Now was my chance.

Go all the way through with the order to the Add to Cart button… fail. “Oops, there was an error.” WTF do you mean “oops” … I’m trying to buy your shit, let me have it. No “oops” necessary.

This happened a couple times actually – never actually going through. Eventually it just got worse. I was lucky if I was able to enter my AT&T account info on the Apple.com store. Usually got some sort of session error after that.

I had read that a lot of people had better luck ordering through AT&T… thought maybe I’d give it a try – if even hesitantly. My biggest reason to order directly through Apple is that I know you can “pre-sign” for their FedEx deliveries so you don’t have to be home to sign for it. A risk, I know… but I am NEVER home during the day when these things deliver – so that is a nice option for people like me.

Anyway, logged into my AT&T page and was able to get to the upgrade page. Selected the 32GB model for preorder and was even able to get to a checkout page. Then it just hung there. I think it was the absolute last page that I had to click on and it did nothing. I don’t mean for 20-30 seconds… I’m talking 10-15 minutes. I eventually gave up and closed it – having not seen a confirmation number or confirmation email or anything from them. Safely assuming (so far) that my order did not complete.

I continued to try through the morning always with the same shitty results (both at&t and apple.com). I even went through our Employee Purchase Program link and it failed there too – though I did end up ordering the dock and an orange “bumper” for it without any issue (though they are not set to deliver until after 7/3 – which will probably be when I’m in Salt Lake City).

Eventually I logged into my account on apple.com to check my order history and cart. Maybe I was missing something… and bam! Two iPhones in my cart waiting to check out. While my first thought was definitely “WTF?!” … my next one was “CHECK OUT!”

Of course I had to remove one of them from my cart (1 phone limit per available line) but was then able to complete checkout and have my 32GB iPhone 4 preordered. Again… what an ordeal.

Now I just have to wait another week + to get it. Then I can even sell my 16GB 3GS. Hopefully still being able to get $200+ for it.