Buy Or Don’t Buy

During the course of my travels today, I walked past two Apple stores. Each had a line outside stretching around the block, full of unfortunate souls who had to spend a beautiful Saturday holed up in a nasty,sweaty queue trying to get a phone to work. (Apple provided stylish black umbrellas so people didn’t get heatstroke, which is both considerate and slightly odd at the same time.) From the AP:

The launch of Apple Inc.’s much-anticipated new iPhone turned into an information-technology meltdown on Friday, as customers were unable to get their phones working.

…

A spokesman for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States, said there was a global problem with Apple’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees were telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

However, the iTunes servers were equally hard to reach from home, leaving the phones unusable except for emergency calls.

Should you feel bad for all these poor people? The answer is: No. No you should not. Because they were early adopters.

Reasons why early adopters do not deserve your sympathy, in handy bullet-point form:

• They are willing to pay exorbitant prices to be the first people to have something, and are jackasses about it. The first iPhones were priced starting at $499, which is a ridiculous amount to spend on an 8GB iPod that is also a phone. Ten weeks later, Apple cut the price to a more reasonable amount. The early adopters were mad- not at the price cut, but at how soon it happened. They wanted their new toy to be unaffordable to the hoi polloi for a lot longer than two months.

• They are pretentious. From the AP again:

Alex Cavallo, 24, was one of hundreds lined up at the Fifth Avenue store in New York, just as he had been a year ago for the original iPhone. He sold that one recently on eBay in anticipation of the new one. In the meantime, he has been using another phone, which felt “uncomfortable.” “The iPhone is just a superior user experience,” he said.

Boo hoo.

• They are really, really pretentious. From the ever-illuminating AP report:

Nick Epperson, a 24-year-old graduate student, spent the night outside an AT&T store in Atlanta, Georgia, keeping his cheer up with bags of Doritos, three games of Scrabble and two packs of cigarettes. Asked why he was waiting in line, he responded simply “Chicks dig the iPhone.”

Douche.