So iPhone 6 preorders went live at 12:01am Pacific, which is 3:01am here, which means I did not actually stay up for it like a sane person. I set an alarm for 6am instead, made coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table like I was about to take the SATs again.
Bad idea, apparently, because by 6am the good stuff was already gone. Not gone-gone, but the 128GB gold 6 Plus I wanted was showing ship dates of "3-4 weeks" before I'd even gotten my cart to load. And getting the cart to load was its own project. AT&T's ordering page threw an error four separate times. I counted, because I was getting genuinely annoyed and wanted to be able to complain about it accurately later. Twice it just spun. Once it told me my session had expired, which is a funny thing to be told at 6:04am when your session had existed for maybe ninety seconds. The fourth time it actually let me through, and I grabbed a 64GB in space gray on the 2-year plan instead ($299, since apparently my dream phone needed a bigger deposit of patience than I had left).
Apple's own store wasn't much better early on: people on Twitter were posting screenshots of the "we'll be back soon" maintenance page well past the announced launch time. To be fair to Apple, this happens basically every year and I don't know why I expect it not to. Millions of people hitting the same checkout flow in the same twenty-minute window is not a normal load pattern and pretending otherwise every September is on me at this point, not them.
The two phones themselves — 4.7 inches on the regular 6, 5.5 on the Plus — are a genuinely different move for Apple after years of the 4-inch form factor being treated like doctrine. I was in the "Apple will never do a big phone, it's not the Apple way" camp for longer than I should admit, and I was wrong, and that's fine, that happens. What I'm actually curious about is whether the Plus is going to feel like a phone or feel like a phone that's cosplaying as a small tablet. Guess I'll know in a week, since mine's estimated to ship September 19th, same as launch day if you believe the tracking email, which I mostly don't yet.
The other thing nobody asked for
Can we talk about the U2 album for a second. On Tuesday, during the actual keynote, Apple and Bono decided that the correct way to release "Songs of Innocence" was to just quietly drop it into the iTunes library of every single person with an account (something like half a billion libraries, allegedly) whether you wanted it there or not. No opt-in. It was just sitting in my Purchased tab when I checked my phone that night, thirteen songs I did not buy, from a band I have not thought about since maybe 2005.
I get that it was framed as a gift. I understand the intent. But there is something uniquely irritating about opening an app you use for your own stuff and finding someone else's stuff already unpacked and sitting on your couch. My Twitter timeline the last three days has been maybe 30% actual iPhone 6 discussion and 70% people asking how to make the U2 album go away, because deleting it from your device doesn't even remove it from your account. It just comes back the next time iCloud syncs, like a chore you thought you finished. There's no clean "decline this gift" button anywhere in iTunes that I could find, and I looked for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time last night instead of doing literally anything else.
I don't think this was some sinister plan, I just think somebody in a room somewhere decided "free music, what's the downside" without running it past anyone whose job it is to ask "what if people don't want music they didn't ask for, showing up in a place they consider theirs." Small thing in the scheme of a week that also had a new phone, a new payment system, and an actual wearable computer announced. But it's the small thing that's stuck with me most, honestly, more than the phone specs did.
Anyway. Order's in, confirmation number saved in three different places because I don't trust myself, and I'll report back once the Plus actually shows up and I find out if my pockets are big enough for the decisions I've made.