Who queues for an iPhone 5? Protesters, hipsters and the jobless The iPhone 5 doesn't go on sale until 8am on Friday, 21 September - yet lines of fanbois, socio-averse hipsters, campaigners and self-promoting twits awaiting the new mobe are already clogging the pavements outside Apple Stores. Yesterday on the steps of London's flagship Regent Street pomaceous-product outlet, punters …
"Did you even READ the article?"
Yes, and they are muppets. Half the people in the front of the que are making a documentary about people who que - what a wonderful piece of cinema that will turn out to be.
No doubt on launch day you will be able to walk into your nearest Apple store an purchase the new Jesus phone without hassle.
There always used to be news stories about people queuing for the News Years sales on boxing day... and one friend of mine had to queue eight hours for a cash machine at the Glastonbury festival and declared it great fun- helped in no small part by a bottle of whisky that was being being passed around, and the by general camaraderie.
It's not my idea of fun, but seems, as an activity, fairly similar to fishing; just sitting in a camp chair waiting for something.
It's not a new phenomenon, and its not limited to fans of Apple.
You are living proof that commentards don't read the articles. Well done on being first.
re: SAD
The irony that you all miss of course is that you all waste your lives *arguing* about this and whose gadgety gadget has the bestest and most biggest gadget power numbers online. Think about that for moment. It's pathetic really.
Fucking hell, we are all here though aren't we.
Personally my reasons are that I wanted to read some comments against Apple, the company. The company that claims to have invented rounded corners, the company who take a 30% slice of apps sales, the company who still have that fugly striped background on their phones that OS9 used. The company who claimed Google had stolen their business by moving into the phone market.
The company who go to court rather than release a significantly better product.
In my late teens and early twenties we would wait in line overnight to get good seats for concert tickets (before ticketmaster monopoly) so this is probably not too different.
I guess that's a sign of getting old, there's nothing currently that I would be willing to wait in line for..other than waiting in line at motor vehicle services to renew my driver's license.
I think my all time queue record is 4 hours for Phantom Menace tickets and that was strictly on a whim and at the spur of the moment. I think Apple encourages this kind of silliness. It's more of that free advertising from the news media.
OTOH, that venue where I queued for TPM simply would never have tolerated a bunch of riffraff loitering for days and days on end.
Did you read it?
Anyway like the iPhone 4S if you want one you can buy one just after the queue went down. about 10am.
I wonder what result you would get if you asked who was on benefits in the same queue? Or the equivalent "Film Maker" I think the first thing these people need to do with their iphone is download a few Job Apps.
I dunno, hijacking a bloody stupid thing like this to promote a worthwhile cause like a local community project seems like a really good use of time to me. A lot better than simply sitting at home in front of a keyboard moaning on some tech forum about what other people choose to do with their short and precious time on this planet!
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There may be some camaraderie in these Apple queues but I'd say it's more a reflection on how little excitement you have in the rest of your life that you would describe it as brilliant experience.
You're spending 3 days camping in the cold for an expensive phone you could have just ordered online. Hell there isn't even any beer or live music.
There may be some camaraderie in these Apple queues but I'd say it's more a reflection on how little excitement you have in the rest of your life that you would describe it as brilliant experience.
I have no interest in iPhones or queuing for things, but I'd say comments like this mostly demonstrate how little some posters understand that people differ. Enjoying the queuing experience is not pathological, an indication of some personal failing, evidence of a dull existence, or a sign of weak-willed consumer subjectivity - as much as many of you might wish otherwise.[1] People can extract psychological and social rewards from many experiences that not materially profitable and don't fit your personal definition of "fulfilling".
Now, if someone would care to offer a robust, intelligent, sophisticated position on why queuing for iPhones is personally or socially destructive, ethically suspect, morally perfidious, etc, we might have grounds for serious debate. As it is, most of the comments like the one above simply suggest that the author is a narrow-minded ass.
[1] Many of these sorts of comments are more than a little reminiscent of the sort of naive-Marxist "prole-bashing" that was popular in certain under-informed critical circles a few decades back. It suggests a lack of critical thought, among other things.
he'd be sued, first by Apple, then by the disabled, then by the charities, then by the rest of the usual suspects, i.e. everybody else who'd think this is an outrageous joke in extremely poor taste.
Hey, why don't we think up something else, like this bearded bloke nobody dares blaspheming about, cause they'd loose their head and testicles... At least we'd get the fireworks in central London by Christmas.
nah, this would be inciting (racial / religious / cultural) hatred... Is it the sound of a 1 mln suicide cabs approaching, or are they just pleased t
Oooh, idea...
Did you hear they've just found some old bit of paper which mentions Jesus having a wife?
Well I'm deeply offended by the blasphemy, and was looking for a completely unrelated location in which to stage a violent protest.
I think I've just hit two birds with one stone!
>Did you hear they've just found some old bit of paper which mentions Jesus having a wife?
Been done. It was mentioned in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which was mentioned by Umberto Echo in the excellent Foucalt's Pendulum and ripped off wholesale by Dan Brown inThe Da Vinci Code, leading to a lawsuit.
Since it would have been unusual for a Jewish man in JC's time not to be married, it is strange that it is not remarked upon in the NT, was the argument. That, and who was it getting married at Canaan? I know many women who would consider a man capable of turning water into wine prime marriage material!
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They are in a queue for a tech gadget - free is equivalent to not worth having and unaffordable is equivalent to the best thing ever....
Personally, I would bump up the price of the tea and coffee and cut costs on the toilet facilities (not what I charge...) to increase my profit margins, but then I might just be a b*st*rd...
They are in a queue for a tech gadget - free is equivalent to not worth having and unaffordable is equivalent to the best thing ever...
Did you read the list of who was there? Lots of people who might have more sense than money.
The unemployed guy is not going to shell out for a cuppa but would probably want to avoid soiling himself.
Good thing too, because that's absolutely stupid, pissing away your time waiting in line to buy a gadget. I can almost understand waiting in line for games, maybe some totally spectacular device, but this is an incremental upgrade to the 4S in many ways.
So maybe what they're saying is, that people who use other types of devices have better things to do with their time than wait around in the street?
Oddly they mostly only queue at the Apple stores. The local RadioShack, AT&T and Verizon shops will all also be selling them but there aren't queues at those places. Clearly it isn't about "being first" but more like an odd act of narcissism in the hope that they can bask in the glow of Appleshine. Are there going to be queues at the malls? Maybe some but mostly I don't think so.
Props to Zohaib Ali on becoming a regular on El Reg and while I'm happy for him that he enjoys the experience, I don't understand it and have to chalk it up to having more dollars than sense.
And so we now know that most of the queruers aren't waiting in line three days in advance out of enthusiasm for the product, but for publicity. After the tenth queruer, The enthusiasts appear, and they aren't nearly as interested in getting media attention. Sad lot, really. I tend to go in on the afternoon of launch day, like last year for the iPhone 4S, and there was no line outside my local Apple store then.
Good luck to them but I wouldn't do it. I've been an early adopter at one point - bought a top of the range DVD player in 96 when they came out and it's still going strong today (when Sony made good stuff) - but certainly wouldn't do it with phones where there have been early days problems in the past. I've seen one preview report that states the screen has a slight yellow tinge in the whites - is that a result of the contrast and vividness tweaks on the screen or is it an issue? I think I'll wait and see.
I once queued overnight for a Hifi shop sale, together with two friends. The shop was fine with us running an extension cord under the door at closing time, so that we could use our coffee machine. The fact that the water canister we had taken with us had frozen was a little showstopper there, but a friendly neighbour helped us out.
The Thick of It is back on TV... when the chai-drinking new-media Tory spin doctor Stewart receives bad news about his standing with the PM, he looks shaken and walks out. One of the other characters remarks:
"I've never seen him lost for poly-syllables before. He took a morning off when when Steve Jobs died, but otherwise it's been seven years of ear-piss"
The reality is the vast majority of the 1st day sales will be shipped by courier - yes I went with a friend and queued for my first iPhone all those years ago (it's still working BTW) but ever since just pre-order online and has arrived on the morning of release anyway. You do it once and it's an experience to meet a load of (friendly) strangers but these days the UPS man just turns up with a small brown box.
Except you would if it gave you great publicity and you sold more as a result....?
Whichever way you cut it - they are selling even more bucketloads than before and any retailer in their right mind would be very, very happy to be in this position where people will queue up to buy (without it having to be a sale).
They don't.
really.. any sane person that really, really wants [x] orders it online, and waits.
Ohter than that half the people waiting in queue for an iFruit shop are doing so on behalf of someone else for [pittance].
Another reason why you shouldnt. Or want to be seen there. or.... [facepalm]
to get into a music festival. Gates opened at 6pm, but sure as hell each year we were there at 8am. The music didnt even start for another 2 days but the queueing to be one of the first a half-flooded campsite was all part of the experience. We had an excellent time with 8 of us crammed into a 2 man tent pitched on the pavement at the front of the queue passing round the bottle of JD.
Sometimes queueing is all part of the overall experience.
Was going to say the same thing. If you don't queue at the concert, you don't get a good spot, close to the stage - there's a rational reason to queue. Come to think of it, if you didn't queue for the tickets in the first place, you wouldn't even have seen the concert at all.
... And it's not as if that concert was going to be re-staged during your lunchbreak in every small phone shop in the country for the next 12 months.
..the saddos who queued in central London for a PS3 when they were launched?
How we laughed. Especially with the police warnings about what would happen with loads of people going home after midnight with £400 game consoles under their arm. (Or heading for HMV with £400 cash possibly on them).
Except Sony gave them their PS3s for free. (1st 100 or something). And a taxi home. And a (then) £2,500 42" plasma TV to play it on.
A lot of these people seem to have valid (for them) reasons for queueing, even if it's just for the laugh or experience. I doubt many of them will regret having done it.
To be fair, I'd be queuing up if I had to wait years for something basic - from 3G to, what is it this time, their own mapping software and a 4" screen. I'd also be queuing up if I'd had to wait 2.5 years for any significant upgrade in phone technology, rather than having the choice of new phones released all year round.
Well okay, only joking - since I don't limit myself to one company, I don't ever need to queue. As Samsung says, it doesn't take a genuis... http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/912341-samsung-mocks-iphone-5-in-new-it-doesnt-take-a-genius-ad-campaign
Apple is pretty good at pocketing nearly all of the margin in the handset industry. I'm surprised that they don't set their prices a hundred pounds higher for the first month or so, to bank the extra idiot margin on the people that think they absolutely have to have it and will buy it NO MATTER THE PRICE. In fact, to these people, paying extra for it would seem to be something they'd be more than willing to do in order to demonstrate their position of high privilege. Maybe Apple could laser etch the price into it so they'd have that to flash around.
I guess there is one potential downside to this: if half the lemmings wait to buy after the first week, they might find out that the next iThing isn't as earthshaking as they had imagined it to be, or they may have realized that they could in fact live without the next new thing. Or there could be some bugs with the new thing that give everyone pause.
I think it has to do with people having just SLIGHTLY better things to do with their time than queuing in the streets for days with total strangers for a new gadget e.g. working, drinking beer, socialising with mates, being "friendly" with their partner, sleeping in a comfortable bed rather than the pavement.
Oops no I forgot, if you aren't an Apple fanatic then by definition you don't have a life?
...who needs to track people with their stupid social networking posta about where they are... if you want to get your hands on some serious shit, just mug these people as they walk out of the store... hell even before they get in you could do over hundreds at night and get all the other tablets and smartphones that seem keen to show off
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