The height of the hype about the Apple iPhone — which goes on sale for the first time here at 6 o'clock Friday evening — was the AT&T memo about crowd control.
The iPhone, after all, has been the most anticipated device in the history of the wireless industry since Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, revealed the prototype to the public last January. But AT&T, Apple's partner and the only system on which the iPhone works, was anticipating something more: huge and unruly lineups when "the Jesus phone" (as it's often called on the Internet) finally went on sale this evening. So AT&T released an internal memo this week, advising store managers on the finer points of crowd control.
Alas, as of lunch Thursday, there were exactly 14 people lined up at Apple's glamorous flagship store at 767 Fifth Avenue. At Manhattan's other outlet, in Soho, seven people were waiting on line. But this being New York, the hustler capital of the most commercialized nation in history, not all of them are exactly "customers."
In Manhattan, where you can see a half a dozen cellphones in use at any intersection, and where your cellphone is a big part of who you are, the most successful viral marketing campaign in history has taken on a life and several viruses of its own.
The hype has been astonishing. According to surveys, 20 per cent of Americans — some 40 million people — are already interested in buying an iPhone, sight unseen. More than 11,000 articles — 61 a day — have been written about the gizmo in the past six months. Google turns up 81 million hits.
On eBay, entrepreneurs are asking $1,000 for the rights to even distantly related domain names, such as my-iphone.com. Meanwhile, Apple's stock has popped up 35 per cent since January.
All this for the as-of-yet untouchable Holy Grail of info-tech, the all-in-one device — a combination smart phone, video player, iPod, camera, Internet browser, organizer, status symbol and chick magnet (although an admittedly elegant one that uses a touch-sensitive glass screen instead of buttons). It's not cheap, either: The iPhone retails for between $500 and $600 (U.S.), not including the rate plan.
Even so, Mr. Jobs hopes to unload 10 million iPhones in the first year — one per cent of the one billion mobile phones sold globally every year. If he can do that, he really is Jesus. Today he has been more fallible: While his successes are legendary, his flops include the Cube, the Newton and the ROKR, Apple's first cellphone venture with Motorola. Several failed because they were too pricey. Meanwhile, Apple's cut of a $500 iPhone was recently estimated by an outside study to be $80 a phone.
The much-vaunted lineup, such as it is, runs south from the two-storey glass cube that serves as the entrance to the famous store at 767 Fifth Avenue. All the early birds have camp chairs. It's hot, low 30s: the heat warps up off the sidewalks and breathes around corners like a dragon, the way it does only in Manhattan. At least half a dozen TV cameras are filming the lineup — as is Apple, to produce a time-lapse movie of the lineup for its website. This is called hyping the hype.
No. 1 in line is Greg Packer, a 43-year-old "retired highway-maintenance worker." He's been here since 5 a.m. Monday, 110 hours before the iPhone goes on sale. No one else showed up until midway through the afternoon.
But Mr. Packer's not the thin, bespectacled techno-wanker you expect. He doesn't even own a computer. (Which is a problem — once purchased, the iPhone has to be activated online through the owner's iTunes account.)
