I swung by the Boylston Street Apple Store in Boston to check out the iPhone 3G festivities and who did I find? None other than Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President for Worldwide Product Marketing.
Phil was hanging by the side of the store on the first floor with his son and, with a white 16GB 3G iPhone in hand, keeping an eye on the festivities. The first customers went in at 8 AM sharp, but the first iPhone purchaser didn't leave until 8:25 -- and some activations were taking close to an hour. I asked Phil if he was concerned about the slow goings of the activation process.
"I've been getting reports from stores all over the world. Some of them report 10 minute activations, some 15, some 20. This is the first time we've done this process -- it's something totally new to us," Schiller told me. "Our retail team has spent a lot of time on this trying to get it right. We're confident that it's going to work well." Schiller did issue a caveat for today's activation performance though. "It's the first day we've been doing this. We'll get better at it as the day goes on."
UPDATE: The launch has descended into chaos. See the details -- and the 90+ comments from other readers -- in Jordan Golson's "Breaking: iPhone 3G launch turns into a disaster"
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