Friday, September 12, 2014

My experience buying an iPhone 6 online at Midnight September 12

I bought two iPhone 6 phones near Midnight, 9/12/14.  How did that work?


  • First I was going to the Apple website, to the store.  http://store.apple.us/  This was not getting me anywhere - just the banner saying that the site would be back up shortly as they were working on it.
  • Then I navigated to the iPhone portion of the main Apple site, and clicked on iPhone 6, and a button in the upper right (which now says Pre-Order Now) said something different about learning where to order.  At about 12:15AM Pacific time, this link changed, but still it brought up the maintenance page.
  • I grabbed both iPhone 5 phones my family owns and made sure the Apple Store app was up-to-date.  I tried to use the Apple Store app on the phone to buy iPhones.  This also did not work.
  • At around 12:30AM, it finally allowed me to enter information about the iPhone I was using to try to upgrade to a new iPhone and to check eligibility.  When this succeeded (it often failed or seemed to time out), I was able to select the iPhone I wanted to upgrade to.  However, the message on the phone let me know that each possible iPhone 6 model I selected was unavailable.
  • At around 12:40, on one phone (and not on the other), when I clicked on some random model with 16GB of storage, it was listed as available!  But this was not the case on the model I wanted.   I clicked around on models some more and the model I wanted, it was listed as available!  However, I was clicking around and clicked to another model which was not available!  Argh!  When I clicked back on the Space Gray 128GB iPhone I wanted, it was still available, and I put it in my cart.
  • I was given the opportunity to buy AppleCare.  I do want AppleCare.  However, trying to add this to the cart timed out several times.  I gave up on AppleCare.
  • I went to check out and paid, accepting terms.
  • Then I moved firmly to the other iPhone, trying over and over to select just the iPhone 6 I wanted.  It continued to show it was not available.
  • By around 1AM, I was able to complete a purchase on the other iPhone.
I checked the web site.  It still only showed the maintenance page...

On the Apple Store website, at around 8AM, I see that this model is still available for September 19th availability... Maybe I did not need to stay up late?


4 comments:

  1. Your experience could have been far better I guess?!

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    Replies
    1. From one perspective, it was a horrible experience. From another perspective, I was able to make the purchase I wanted, which is success. I would much rather have the process "just work".

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  2. The world we live in today is moving so rapidly that usage and demand of cellphones and tablets is increasing on a fast pace.A broken iPhone or any smartphone you own can create a screeching halt in this fast moving world. The demand of iPhone repair and other smartphone repair is getting increased with the increasing usage.
    iPhone Repair Katy

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