World+Dog goes bonkers for iPhone 4S O2 has claimed it sold more iPhone 4S handsets in the first hour the gadget has been on sale than the number of iPhone 4s it shifted in 2010. The new version of the smartphone went on sale in the UK at 8am this morning to the inevitable fan fanfare despite the grumblings of many a pundit over Apple's unwillingness to launch an …
I've never understood the clamour to get something on release day. If you haven't pre-ordered, why bother?
"Rob Shoesmith, a former binman from Coventry, camping outside the Covent Garden store for ten days in order to be the first to hand over 500 quid for the new phone."
1. Where does a former binman (former? what does he do now?) get that kind of throwing away money? Clearly I'm not getting paid enough in science.
2. If he's working, why the hell would he waste his annual leave camping on a street?
3. If he's not working, first refer to question 1, and second, why isn't he spending this time looking for a job?
Blimey! Has this chap upset you? I'm with you on your first statement, but the rest of your post is having an unprovoked pop at an individual. Bit unfair. So, here's a retort on his behalf (well, it's a quiet day today).
1. Maybe he saved up. Maybe he won the lottery. Maybe he worked lots of overtime. Maybe binmen in the company he worked for do, actually, earn more money than you think.
2. Because he wants to? I know some folk who spend days sat by a fugging river, watching a coloured bit of wood bobbing about. Maybe he REALLY wants an iPhone4S...?
3. Maybe he's retired and got a big handshake and pension. Maybe he no longer needs to work any more and doesn't need a job. Maybe he thinks you should just mind your own business!
There. (ho-hum)
ok, I'm bias in that I quite like my iPhone, but WTF?
More in an hour than in the whole of 2010...it's only an evolutionary bump in spec, not a brand new phone FFS. How is is possibly selling/pro-ordering so well?
Has someone's not got a decimal point misplaced on the sales spreadsheet or something?
I suppose, lots of 3s and 3's getting long in the tooth and people who are finally updating their not so smart phones and people replacing other types of phones having come to the conclusion "they may as well wait for the new iphone."
And why go out in the queues? As I said maybe to be part of the experience, why the hell not, it's only a Friday morning/afternoon.
"O2 has claimed it sold more iPhone 4S handsets in the first hour the gadget has been on sale than the number of iPhone 4s it shifted in 2010."
Yup, I made the same initial interpretation as you - namely that this morning, in an hour, O2 topped their entire 2010 sales numbers. Seems rather unlikely!
It's hardly a story though. If Apple are doing the usual ploy of not meeting demand then they get to control how many are sold each time. If they release 100,000 on day one, and next year release 100,001 on day one, they are able to perpetually generate the news story of "sales figures for opening day beat previous iPhone". Easiest marketing ploy in the world!
OK, Mr Trolly McTrollington, I'll feed:
let's look at your logic, if I may?
You say the iPhone is a flash in the pan.
Very difficult to quantify, but they have been around for, what, 4 years now and still selling out. Tech is very fickle, but, and please forgive me if I am teaching egg-sucking here , but currently it is Apple who are setting teh trends, not following them.
You then say that iPhone is dated and dying. Sales figures seem to contradict that.
You talk about 1,000s of purchases. Ramp it up youth, we are talking 1,000,000s of purchases which is a fuck lot more.
You finally equate people buying iPhones as just being sheep. But this is against the previous statement that iPhones are dead (which is incompatible with sheepiness behaviour) and miss the obvious point that Droids outsell iPhones by about 2 or 3 to 1 so if iPhone buyers are sheep then droid buyers are the sheep of sheep.
But, we can summarise it all as such:
You don't have enough money to buy an iPhone and that makes you sad. Which makes you lash out. Don't worry, one day you will leave school and get a job and then, if you work hard enough, you can buy whatever shiny stuff you want.
G'ah! I queued to get into Alton Towers once! I wish I'd had you to coach me in the car park and I'd have come back on a rainy day in October instead.
Have queued in McDonalds once on a lunchtime, maybe I should have come back later in the afternoon.
What a fool I've been. Perhaps instead of doing what I damn well please, I should listen to people telling me not to be a sheep and ironically do what they tell me.
Disclaimer: didn't queue for an iPhone, but more than happy for people to go out and fill their boots.
As with previous stories of huge queues for iProducts, these comment pages will soon be awash with folk going on about how sad Apple Fanbois are and how pathetic it is that people will camp for up to 10 days to get their hands on one. They might be correct. Personally, I wouldn't, but I can't bemoan another man for his passion. However, you can't deny the evidence that these products are hitting the mark. I wish I could invent and market a product that gets this sort of following.
Now, where's the envy icon......
Well after waiting once my 3GS contract expired 3 months ago, i was slightly disappointed that it wasn't an iphone 5 i was upgrading to but i'm happy with my 4S. got to the O2 store 1 hour before opening and joined as the sixth person in the queue and only about 20 when the store opened. plenty of stock and no one was going home dissapointed by a sell out.
The O2 Store i went too, Barnsley. drove past Meadowhell on my commute to work (in barnsley) and thought better of the 2 O2 stores and Apple Store in there. Bet they were busy.
I'd guess the circumstantial evidence is gained by witnessing the same story with each revision, and that Apple broadly know how many they expect to sell, yet don't make them available on day 1. They may not be in a warehouse, but they sure as hell ain't in a shop or a consumer's pocket.
He says he can afford it, so doesn't see why he should be getting it for free.
... but there is another point about "gratis" handsets: More and more of those first-day queues are actually iOS developers in a desperate race to get their hands on test hardware before their most intolerant and vocal customers do.
Apple's cult of secrecy means that there's no advance hardware programme, so you've just got to get in line with the fanbois because it's the only way to be sure your software runs okay on the new thing.
I rather thought that iOS devs would be running their software on the simulator that's in the dev pack and on the current hardware that they flash with the development firmware they get from Apple.
Much the same thing that devs for other environments do, TBH.
Most small devs will not really care about the upgraded hardware (5m camera becomes 8m, how many apps will that effect in reality?) and larger houses *do* get access to the new hardware.
Seriously. What is it with Apple and their maddening habit of releasing things that *actual* people want, instead of the fevered ramblings of the pundit cult who cry shame when Apple mysteriously fails to release the made-up shit that these idiots have been short-stroking for the previous six months in order to satisfy their overblown egos?
@Richard 81: You might want to wipe some of the rabid foam from your chin and actually do a little bit of research. Rob Shoesmith is a 'former binman' because - wait for it - he's now an iOS developer who won a design competition! It's apparently possible for someone to change jobs in this country! Who knew??
http://www.macworld.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?blogId=8&entryId=746
You're welcome.
Pillock.
Commentard rules state I must ensure I use the words 'cult', 'secrecy', 'Jobisan', 'fanboi' and/or 'mactard' at least once each in this post.
For me it's new album releases from a few favourite bands, or new books from a few favourite authors. I'll buy those on the first day of availability - heck I'll sit eagerly by my computer waiting for the digital availability, or get up early for the delivery from amazon.
Just because somebody else is excited about something different to you doesn't make them sad. Actually sad/depressed people are the ones who get excited about nothing.
To sell more in an hour than 6 months of last year would be off the fucking chart.
Of course by this time next year, when every phone and computery thing has an indispensable Siri type AI embedded, Apple introducing it to the mass market will be ignored by the haters because it will turn out to have been an obvious evolution and would have happened anyway and Apple didn't invent it and blah blah fucking blah.
The level of ingratitude to this company from the IT sector is frankly depressing.
They do - this is just more sloppy reporting from El reg.
http://www.mobilenewscwp.co.uk/2011/10/operators-claim-iphone-4s-sales-breaking-records/
'O2 claimed it had sold more iPhone 4S devices in the first hour of sales than the iPhone 4 handset in the same period when it was released last year. It also said white versions of the device were outselling black ones.'
@AC "Er, hang-on a minute. You appear to be crediting Apple with being the first company to release a telephone with a working voice control function. Just for clarity, is that what you are doing? Seriously??"
No, I don't think that's what he's saying at all and I think you know that.
Apple may not invent many things, but you have to give them credit for being a company that takes existing technology and steps it up a gear and integrates it better than the competition.
I have used many phones with 'working' voice control systems before and to be honest I try it once or twice and then give up because they are always limited in function and usefulness. What I haven't ever used is a phone where the voice recognition is so deeply embedded that I can schedule meetings, set reminders, dictate emails, ask random questions, move meetings around, play a certain genre of music, etc. all using natural speech. One where I don't have to follow an exact script of only a few phrases. So although Apple didn't invent it, they were the first to embed it so deeply and seamlessly into a handset. I agree that Apple does deserve some credit for pushing existing technology further than their competitors and often making it actually useful.
Having used smartphones for many years, and having had PDAs before that, I have to say the iPhone UI was a complete revelation. And if Apple hadn't created it, we would still be stuck with fiddly, cramped Windows PocketPC, using styluses and tapping on tiny menus. I for one am glad Apple produced the iPhone because of how it shook up the 'set in its ways' phone industry. We now have many competing smartphones to choose from, with far better UIs than they would have had without the kick up the arse that the iPhone gave them. Hopefully Siri will be the kick that the industry needs to make speech recognition a truly useful technology and not just a gimmick no one uses.
Siri is not just a voice control for a mobile phone. My ancient Nokia had that, my iPhone(s) have had that for ages too.
Siri is a deal more clever than that. Whether it will be anything more than a gimmick time will tell but stop comparing it to shouting "Call home" 20 times at your phone and being put through to your ex girlfriend. That is not the same tech.
well, at about 11:45 this morning, the guy i sit next to said "hm, the website reckons that the o2 shop in town has still go 4Ss in stock, fancy going to get one at lunchtime?". i said "oh, is that out today?" and went to see if my contract was up yet as i havnt been paying much attention.
so come lunchtime, and we went for a drive into town. walked up to the shop and saw no queue - immediately thought to ourselves "bah, guess they sold out already", having heard about these 'massive queues' everywhere, but walked in to make sure. 10 minutes later walked out with shiney new iphone 4S.
yeah, was terrible, i'm sure... must be SUCH a fanboy to go for a 5 minute drive, walk into a shop, and buy something ;).
You whinge about a 'former binman' being about to afford a £500 phone - well maybe he doesn't spend £5 a day on cigs (over £1800 a year!) or whatever else you choose to spend your cash on - over 18 months it's not even £1 a day.
Sure it's not a cheap phone but it's not as if you have to be a millionaire - I know plenty of people on benefits who also manage to find the cash for a £45/month phone contract and spend £70/month on Sky.
and I charitably assume you've missed the fact that Siri was available from the App Store up until about 2-3 weeks ago, that it was invented by a third party and that all Apple have done is bolt it into the UI.
So yes, there are many people out there able to comment on how well Siri does or doesn't work.
I walked into the Vodafone shop in Edinburgh Princes Street at about 8:45 this morning and was served after waiting behind a massive one person. Seemingly the O2 store was queued out most of the day but thats probably largely due to their stupid decision to not take pre-orders (I took approx 20 seconds to get my phone as opposed to the 15-20 mins a non pre-order would take) and the fact that their activations weren't working properly with folk having their old phone disconnected and the new one NOT connected.
Also to Mr "I don't give a rats ar$e" clearly you do, you read the story after all.
Loving my new shiny gadget and could care less what the haters think but by the same token I would never be stupid enough to queue for hours nevermind days to get a phone.
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