So it's the Thursday after Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday came and went three days ago with Adobe reporting something like $1.465 billion in online sales (a new record, apparently, up something like 30% from last year), and I spent a chunk of my actual holiday week doing something dumber: refreshing the Google Play Store over and over trying to buy a Nexus 4.
If you haven't been following this particular saga, here's the short version. Google and LG put the Nexus 4 up for sale on November 13th. Unlocked, no contract, $299 for the 8GB model and $349 for 16GB, which for a phone with a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro and a 1280x768 screen is genuinely a good price. It's the kind of price that makes you stop and do a double take, because carrier-subsidized phones had trained all of us to think "unlocked flagship" meant $650 minimum. And then it sold out. Not in a day. Not in an hour. People were reporting checkout carts emptying in under 30 minutes, and by the time I'd even loaded the page it was already gone.
I want to be a little annoyed about this, because I am a little annoyed about this. I don't think Google actually wanted to sell a lot of these at launch, or if they did, whoever did inventory planning badly underestimated demand for a phone this cheap with this hardware. Since the 13th it's been this weird pattern of "in stock" for a window of a few minutes, sometimes announced on Twitter, sometimes not, and then gone again. I tried again this morning around 9am my time because someone on a forum said restocks were happening in the mornings lately, and I got as far as the payment page before the checkout just... timed out. Sat there spinning for maybe 45 seconds and then dumped me back to an error. Tried again ten minutes later, already sold out.
I'm not even mad about the phone being popular. I'm mad about the checkout flow. If you're going to do these staggered drip restocks instead of just building enough inventory, the actual buying experience needs to not be held together with duct tape. This isn't 2001, they should be able to handle a surge in traffic to what's basically their flagship storefront for their flagship phone.
(Small tangent, but related in my head: this is also the week Gangnam Style passed Baby as the most-viewed video on YouTube, something like 805 million views last I checked before it happened, which is such a strange thing to type out. I remember when a video hitting 10 million views felt like a huge deal. Now we're measuring cultural moments in the hundreds of millions and it still keeps climbing. Anyway.)
Back to phones for a second. Part of why I want the Nexus 4 specifically and not, say, a Lumia 920 (which AT&T's been pushing hard since it launched a couple weeks back, giant Times Square billboards and everything) is that I've had it with carrier bloatware and delayed updates. My current phone is still on an Android version that's two behind, and I know for a fact the manufacturer has just quietly stopped caring about it. Pure Google builds get updates the day they're released, or close to it. That matters more to me than a couple of camera megapixels or whatever spec war is happening this month.
The other option, obviously, is to just wait. Wait a few weeks, let the initial rush die down, let Google (hopefully) actually build more units. I know this is the sensible thing to do. I also know myself, and I know I'm going to keep hitting refresh on that page at odd hours for at least another week before I admit defeat and wait it out properly. There's something almost compulsive about it once you've decided you want a specific thing and the internet keeps telling you no.
If anyone reading this actually managed to get one in a recent restock, I'd genuinely like to know what time of day it happened and whether you did anything differently, because at this point I'll take pattern-matching over sitting here trusting the process. And if you're one of the people who already has one, feel free to rub it in a little. I can take it.
I'll update this if I ever actually get through checkout. Which, as of 11:47am today, has not happened.