So I was up at 3am on Friday setting an alarm for something that isn't a flight, which should tell you everything about the state of my judgment lately. Preorders for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus opened at 12:01am Pacific on the 12th, which is 3:01am here, and I told myself I'd just quietly do it from bed and go back to sleep. That did not happen.
Apple.com would not load. Not "slow," not "spinning wheel for a bit": actually would not load, kept throwing me back to a maintenance page for almost forty minutes. I tried the Apple Store app instead and it just sat there thinking about it. Gave up and tried Verizon's site around 3:40 and that one crashed too, threw some error about my session timing out before I'd even picked a color. By the time I actually got an order through it was almost 4:15am and I was fully awake with the kind of jittery adrenaline you get from doing your taxes, not buying a phone.
Anyway. I got it. Ordered the 6 Plus, not the regular 6, and I want to talk about that for a second because it was genuinely the harder decision of the two, weirdly not the "should I even upgrade" part.
The 6 Plus is 5.5 inches. That is a big phone. My hands are not enormous and I know already there will be a two week period where I drop it constantly trying to reach the top corner of the screen with my thumb. I've made fun of phablets for two straight years on this blog, mostly aimed at the Galaxy Note crowd, and here I am buying one basically the same size because Apple finally made one. I'm aware how that looks. I don't fully have a defense for it beyond: I read a lot on my phone, on the train mostly, and the regular 6 at 4.7 inches felt like a small upgrade from my 5s rather than an actual different experience. So, fine. I'm a hypocrite. I'll live.
Pricing, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention: the 6 Plus is $299 for 16GB, $399 for 64GB, $499 for 128GB on a two year contract, which is a full hundred bucks over the equivalent regular 6. They also finally killed the 32GB tier, which I think is the actually good decision buried in all this — 16GB has been a joke for two generations now with how big photos and apps have gotten, but at least now the jump is to 64 instead of a useless 32. I went 64GB. Anyone still buying the 16GB model in 2014 with 4K-ish video capture on this thing is going to regret it by Christmas, I'd bet real money on it.
Ship date on my order says early-to-mid October for the Plus, which stung a little — the regular 6 is apparently still shipping on the 19th like planned, it's specifically the Plus that's already backordered less than 24 hours after preorders opened. Guess I wasn't the only indecisive person biting the bullet on the bigger one.
A friend of mine who does IT support for a small company here texted me Friday morning to complain that literally every carrier site was falling over that morning, not just Apple's, and that he'd had three separate coworkers ask him to help them place orders because none of them could get the AT&T site to hold their session either. That felt like a nice bit of confirmation I wasn't losing my mind, and also a small reminder that this stuff is genuinely a mass event now in a way it wasn't back when I got my first iPhone in 2011 waiting outside a store.
One thing I keep circling back to: Apple Pay isn't live yet, that's an October thing tied to iOS 8.1, and the Watch wasn't even up for preorder at the event last week, they said early 2015 for that. So this round is really just about the phone, which honestly is kind of refreshing after a keynote that threw three new product categories at once. I like being able to just think about one thing.
I'll do a real writeup once it actually arrives and I've lived with the size for a week, because I think the size question is the only interesting question here, everything else about this phone is a predictable spec bump. For now I'm just tired and a little poorer and mildly annoyed at how my hands are going to feel by October.