So the iPhone 4S is officially available for pre order and as of 11am (Pacific) you can still go to http://store.apple.com and grab your selected model for October 14th delivery in the USA.
In case you were wondering I did stay up to pre order mine just in case demand was greater than supply.
Here is what I experienced:
Logged on to iChat about 2 hours before midnight and hooked up with my buddy from http://www.photofriday.com to pass the time while we both waited to secure our new devices
At about midnight reports came in from http://forums.macrumors.com that Verizon and Sprint preorders were up. Still no sign of orders going up on http://store.apple.com as the store was still showing closed.
At about 12:40a (Pacific) http://store.apple.com came online but for the next hour or so both myself and my friend were unable to get past the carrier eligibility page. HTTP errors, timeouts and “Sorry we were unable to process your request” messages.
Around 1:40a (Pacific) the ability to pre order an iPhone went down and stayed down for about 10 minutes.
Around 1:50a (Pacific) both myself and my friend were able to “Reserve” our iPhones. Apple seemed to remove the carrier check at this point and simply allowed you to reserve your phone. Got an email from apple stating they would contact me when it was time to finish the process of ordering my phone.
Around 3:30a (Pacific) I got my email from Apple and successfully finished my order for my iPhone 4S
Overall I am really happy with the way Apple handled the situation this time. In my opinion it was much appreciated that they took the store down to change the pre order process to a reservation system. Not only did this tweak in the process save me some stress but it also let me catch some sleep as opposed to staying up all night hitting refresh.
How about you? Did you pre order an iPhone 4S and if so what was your experience?
