So the iPhone 5s came out yesterday and I did the thing I said I wasnt going to do, which is stand in a line for a phone. Got to the store around 8:40, doors opened at 8, and it was already a decent crowd, mostly guys in their twenties on their phones taking pictures of the line to put on their phones. Very efficient loop of self-documentation.
Here's the part that actually got me typing this instead of just tweeting it: the gold one was gone almost immediately, and by last night people were already reselling it on eBay for stupid money. I saw a completed listing for a 64GB gold 5s that went for something like $1,500. Unopened box, still sealed, sold same day it launched. There were a bunch more sitting in the $700-900 range that hadnt sold yet when I checked this morning but were clearly fishing for the same crowd. Retail on that phone with a contract is $399, and without a contract its $749 from Apple directly if you can even find one. So the scalper isnt even really beating full retail by that much once you factor in eBay and PayPal fees, which tells you this is less about arbitrage and more about impatience. Somebody out there wants a gold phone today more than they want to save four hundred dollars, and honestly, fine, thats their money.
I dont really get the gold thing as a status object though. Its not gold-gold, its this champagne-ish color that in person looks kind of like a slightly off white iPhone that caught some sun. I ended up getting the space gray one, partly because it was in stock and partly because I think gold phones look like they belong to a guy who also owns a gold watch he checks constantly in meetings.
Touch ID, briefly
The fingerprint sensor is the actual reason I upgraded, not the color lineup. First impressions: it works more often than it doesnt, which is a weird sentence to have to write about unlocking a phone, but thats where we are. I registered two fingers and it reads my thumb fast, my index finger less reliably, especially if I've just washed my hands or its cold out. Im still locking it with a passcode as backup because Im not fully ready to trust a sensor thats existed in shipping consumer phones for about 30 hours to be the only thing standing between someone and my email. Give it a few weeks.
Also, small complaint, not really about the phone itself: iOS 7 has been on my phone since Wednesday and Im still not used to it. The flat icons, the weird thin font in some menus, the parallax wallpaper thing that makes we wonder if its going to give someone motion sickness. Ive read at least four blog posts this week comparing the new Safari icon to a marble or a beach ball, which, yeah, fair. Im not going to pile onto that particular pile-on since it feels like everyone with a keyboard has already written that post. Ill just say the redesign is going to take some adjusting to and leave it there.
Anyway, the line thing. I want to talk about the line for a second because its genuinely a strange social ritual at this point. Nobody in that line needed to be there that day. The phone would've been in stock at some point without waiting outside a mall entrance at 6am. But theres something to the shared misery of it, the guy behind me who drove from another town, the Apple employees handing out water bottles like its a marathon. Im not sure Ill do it again next year, I say that every year, we'll see.
If youre thinking about hunting down a gold one on eBay this weekend, my advice is just wait. Apple restocks these things fast once the initial line-standing crowd is served, and paying a thousand-dollar premium for a color is the kind of decision youll regret by Halloween when the novelty wears off and its just a phone in your pocket again, same as the black one, same as the white one before that.