Tips for landing an iPhone
We at CNET News.com dialed up 75 Apple and AT&T retail stores this week in hopes of dislodging some secrets to landing—or, although it seemed forbidden in most cases, even reserving—a coveted iPhone. — The verdict? No one's really sure how the scheduled June 29 launch …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks out from the confirmed June 29 iPhone launch, CNET dialed 75 Apple and AT&T retail stores and found no consistent answer on how — or whether — a customer could reserve the device, with reservations apparently forbidden at most locations. The same-day pickup under the headline 'The great iPhone hunt of 2007' shows how widely the availability confusion resonated: the launch's biggest open question isn't the product, it's the buying process.
First-order effects
- Shoppers calling Apple and AT&T stores this week get contradictory answers on reservations because neither company has published a unified pre-sale policy, leaving individual stores improvising their own rules for June 29.
Second-order effects
- With reservations mostly off the table, demand funnels into launch-day lines instead, turning store-level staffing and inventory counts at both retail chains into the binding constraint on first-week sales.
Third-order effects
- If secrecy-plus-scarcity holds as the template, queueing rather than pre-ordering becomes the de facto allocation mechanism for marquee device launches — and whoever controls that launch narrative, here Apple over carrier partner AT&T, sets the terms for both brands' retail channels.
The trend: Handset launches are shifting from carrier-run pre-sale logistics toward manufacturer-controlled, event-style releases where managed scarcity does the marketing.