iPhone envy at the 24-hour Apple store
Posted: Friday, July 11, 2008 1:21 PM by Ian Sager
By Ian Sager, msnbc.com editor
There’s no better proof that New York never sleeps than the 24-hour Apple store. The Fifth Avenue landmark is open all hours, 365 days a year, and is always buzzing with business. When I arrived there at 7 a.m. this morning, the storefront area was more than just buzzing. It was vibrating, ring-toning, GPS-ing, and doing everything else that the iPhone 2.0 promised to the line of excited buyers.
By 7:40 a.m., the line snaked down the block, around the corner, and only got longer as the morning progressed. But the crowd kept in good spirits. One woman, Elyannie Espinao of Manhattan, told me that she’d “accidentally” dropped her old iPhone in the toilet recently. “I’m looking to either fix my old one, or upgrade to the new model,” she said. When asked which way she was leaning, Espino looked at me as if I had three heads, smirked, and said, “Leaning towards an upgrade.” Another Manhattan resident, David Major, 28, confessed, “I sold my old iPhone on EBay last night. When I saw what they were going for, I decided to sell my old one to cover the cost of my new phone.”
As the excitement of edging closer to the front of the line grew, entrepreneurs worked the crowd. Companies plied them with energy drinks, bottles of water, organic apples, local restaurant menus, s’mores, and free cups of coffee. People were offering free handouts of everything imaginable (but, sadly, not iPhones).
Not surprisingly, security was on hand whenever someone’s iPhone excitement bubbled over. A man was not-so-subtly asked to move on after informing the crowd that their reward for a morning spent on the line would be an eternity with Satan.
Amid all the chaos, I encountered Hiro Horinaga, 28, who was sitting in a folding chair he had brought along with him. A veteran of the first iPhone camp-out, Horinaga clutched his soon-to-be-obsolete first-version phone. When I asked him what he was most looking forward to, he told me, “watching YouTube videos.”
As I watched happy customers exit the Apple store, I thought about my own non-Apple smartphone. It’s been a trusty companion: I can always count on it to give me text messages, alerts, e-mail – and even sore thumbs from typing on its miniscule keyboard. But standing there with that clunky thing wedged into my pocket, I felt an undeniable sense of iPhone envy. When the next version comes out, look for me next to Horinaga and the other die-hards, folding chair and all, in that long line at the Apple store.
For more information on the release of the iPhone 3G, watch as Apple devotees flock to the Fifth Avenue Apple store in Manhattan. NBC's Clare Duffy reports.
