Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

It Might Already Be Too Late to Be First in Line at the Apple Store This Week

A line has already formed to buy the iPhone 5 at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City, reports CNET. That’s nearly a week before the device is to be released — on Sept. 21 at 8 am ET — at Apple retail stores, as well as through carriers and other big-box partners.

But CNET’s Greg Sandoval said that the handful of folks in line just after midnight on Sunday seemed more motivated by publicity than a slimmer phone that can read out sports scores.

Which makes sense, because if they’re willing to put in a week’s worth of camping out on a city sidewalk, they probably could have mustered the effort to preorder in the middle of the night.

Analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray had estimated sales of six million to 10 million iPhone 5s in the first week, and that was back at the beginning of the month, when the device was still just a (substantially leaked) figment of Apple lovers’ imaginations.

Apple is taking an aggressive global rollout schedule for the iPhone 5, and said on Friday that it was “completely blown away” by the volume of overnight preorders. Shipping-time estimates were pushed back just an hour after the iPhone 5 became available online.

The opportunistic start-up TaskRabbit is offering a service where its errand runners will wait in line for four hours for $55 at New York City and San Francisco Bay Area stores on Friday morning.

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First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter