Author: Chris Hunter

Editor: Eric Strider

Rainstorms and heavy traffic were fighting hard to keep dedicated fans from their Apple store. However, when the Fastsilicon.com crew showed up at the mall at 10am sharp, we discovered that although the mall "opens" at 10am, the doors open at 6am. The Apple hardcore were already there in droves, a quick head count came up with roughly 50 hopefuls by the time we queued up.

At the Apple Store itself, the accoutrement's looked like business as usual, but with two gigantic and flashy iPhone displays behind the main windows. Behind the thick panes of glass, two scaled iPhones models rested as the main attraction. They were at least 10 times larger than real life with high resolution LCDs showing off the iPhone's garish visuals.

Bystanders walked back and forth past the stagnant line, staring in wonder at the devotion of the common Apple enthusiast, and the vast majority of them knew why they were there. The iPhone has been receiving massive press coverage for the past six months and anyone who escaped its grasp must have been living under a rock. Everyone was excited and prepared for the long awaited arrival of their iPhone.

The question on every camper's mind was how many iPhones were available to purchase and would they be lucky enough to receive one. When fastsilicon.com tried to establish a number, the efforts made were futile. The Apple employees at the store were tight lipped, responding to any questions on iPhone stock numbers with a simple ‘I don't know.' There were rumors circulating that if they were to reveal a number they would be fired. Apple probably did this to keep the mystery up and more people waiting in line. That is exactly what they ended up with.

At around 2pm the first stirrings from the Apple camp came about. They closed down the store and put up black construction paper against the glass to hide their ant activities within. As the construction paper was hung, you could see twenty to thirty employees getting ready to rearrange and setup the store. The anticipation was palpable. Screams and hollers echoed through the mall.

Through the morning, the line grew about 6 feet an hour. An apex was reached within the last three hours with growth rates of 30-40 fifty feet an hour. Including all people within the line, a total of 193 people lined up, and when asked how many phones each was going to get, two was the average response. Some had plans to get 8 or more with a large group of people just buying phones for one person. The line was also polled for the question "why the iPhone", the overwhelming response was that it was a native product for their native environment. The majority of the users were Mac exclusive. In fact, only two windows laptops were amongst the throngs of glowing Apple logos.

The greater part of phone upgrades were the Treo and Blackberry group. Most of them were interested in an integrated experience that the windows based phones simply didn't provide. We joined the friendly multitude of people that were the early birds here and interviewed many of them to determine their motivations for waking up early and coming to a mall to wait for 12 hours. The answers varied from "I'm a nerd." to "I buy everything they release". Basically, it's a culture of loyalty that can't help but pull in innocent bystanders. Apple has a genius marketing strategy...market to the loyal hardcore fans and they'll create all the hype and buzz needed to rocket products into cultural icon status. Remember the iPod? One item is certain; Apple has the hearts of every person in the line.

By 4PM, about 140 warm bodies had accumulated and then the less avid Apple fans came out of the woodwork. However, the reasons for being there were the same for each. They love Apple, and already know how the iPhone works flawlessly within Mac environments. Within the next hour and a half, another fifty people topped off the line before the main events started and focus had to be shifted to Apple themselves. Within the queuing field, the final demand count was approximately 188 iPhones at the Penn Square Apple Store. Due to the police presence and general orders from apple, any actual numbers are hard to come by

At minutes before 6PM, the black paper hiding the secret Apple activities inside was torn down to reveal no less than 16 iPhone demo units tethered to the tables and iPhone propaganda covering the walls, replacing all of the marketing materials for the numerous other Apple products. Our sole Apple reviewer was escorted into the store, and the review now switches to his perspective.