Tumbleweeds outnumber punters, as iPhone's First Night flops
Journalists and PR minders outnumbered buyers on Friday night as interest in Apple's iPhone miserably failed to live up to the pre-launch hype in the UK. — The iPhone went on sale at stores operated by retail titan Carphone Warehouse …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Register's empty-storefront report lands a day after Dial-a-Phone's 'don't believe the hype' piece asking whether UK crowds would materialise at all — a question the 6pm Friday openings at Carphone Warehouse and O2 answered with press pens outnumbering queues. The scepticism had precedent: back in June, ahead of the American launch, the New York Post was already advising readers not to get hung up on launch-day buying.
What makes the flop more than an embarrassing photo op is the apparatus behind the night: Apple staged a two-market European debut — UK and Germany together, with the OS X 1.1.2 update pushed out overnight — and gave the UK exclusively to Carphone Warehouse retail and O2, both of whom now carry the optics of a hyped launch that failed to draw. The Guardian's own coverage ran under a banner urging readers to 'set the iPhone free', a sign the rival narrative competing with queue photos was the exclusivity lock itself.
First-order effects
- Carphone Warehouse and O2 staffed evening launches and stocked for a rush, but the immediate yield is negative imagery — their stores became the backdrop for tumbleweed coverage rather than sold-out signage.
- Apple's European debut opens with public doubt about demand rather than celebration, putting the burden of proof on the next sales figures instead of the launch event itself.
Second-order effects
- O2's exclusive-carrier bet absorbs the damage: with no visible queue to cite, O2 must convert interest into contracts through ordinary retail selling, and any tariff or promotion response is its decision to negotiate with Apple.
- Every slow-sales headline strengthens the unlock-the-handset argument the Guardian pressed — that the O2 exclusivity, not the device, is what suppresses UK demand — sharpening pressure on the single-network deal structure.
Third-order effects
- If opening-night theatre keeps producing empty-pavement pictures abroad, first-weekend sell-through numbers become the contested evidence of demand, displacing queue photographs as the metric Apple and its carriers trade on.
- A soft start in the UK and Germany stress-tests the portability of Apple's premium-device-plus-one-carrier-per-country template; sustained lag would put the exclusivity structure itself under renegotiation pressure in each market.
The trend: Apple's US launch playbook — hype cycle, exclusive carrier, opening-night spectacle — is facing its first international test, where contract uptake over the following quarters will count for more than first-night queues.