My opening trail.

Every time, no matter how much I seem to be prepared to order my new iPhone, it’s always a complicated process. Things seemed to go smoothly with AT&T about half an hour after pre-orders were supposed to open up at 3:01 EDT on Friday, 9/12. I had set an alarm for 2:40 and decided I could wait around. I ended up falling asleep until past 3:30. I thought I might have missed my window when the Apple Store app wouldn’t let me purchase. I soon discovered the Apple site was down so I went ahead on the carrier side. I placed my order, but was paranoid about whether I got it in and everything worked out. Thank goodness for that, because I went to the Apple site and pretended to go through the ordering process from them when their site finally came up two hours later than expected. When it got to the stage where it needed information from AT&T, they couldn’t get a response, so they actually reserved a phone for me. All I had to do was complete the order by a certain time.

By the time I woke up for work a few hours later, I finally saw a confirmation email in my inbox. That set my mind at ease, in addition to my backup plan with the reserved phone through Apple. Just as I was feeling good about things by Saturday, I got an email from AT&T with further details on my order. Instead of the anticipated 9/19 ship date I expected, they were now projecting 9/23-10/2! I was not pleased with this news, so I immediately set about activating my Plan B. I called AT&T, cancelled my order, made sure my line showed up as eligible for an upgrade again, and went to place my reserved order (with guaranteed shipment on 9/19) via Apple.

Activating phone…

Alas, once I got to the billing part, I ran across an issue that led to three live chats and a bunch of service calls to both Apple and AT&T. You see, Apple forces you to ship to your billing address. This would have been fine had it been set to use the billing address I had updated with Apple. What I did not expect is that it latched on to the AT&T billing information and would not allow me to change it! That information was still under my old information in LA, since part of the account is for our Uverse service at home there. Even after making the update in my account, my reservation didn’t update. I didn’t want to lose the delivery date I had locked in and I certainly didn’t want my phone shipped clear across the country, so I spent the rest of Saturday and much of Sunday figuring this all out!

Ultimately, it was as simple as completing my order through the reservation and then calling in to Apple support to have the shipping information fixed. If only they had come to that solution before I jumped through all sorts of hoops to order. Even after that, I was anxious about my shipment. I kept checking to make sure the shipping information remained updated and that the shipment date still said 9/19. Over the course of the next week, all went well with that and by last Friday I was tracking my shipment. Luckily, Panda wasn’t working that day, so he was home to sign for the package when it arrived around 10:30 that morning.

I was so excited and eager that I had him meet me for lunch and bring the phone so I could get started with it right away. I even did my unboxing at Vapiano’s while waiting for our food! I love how it feels and I actually find it less likely to drop than my iPhone 5 (and 4 and 3G). In fact, I’m happy that I’ve yet to drop it so far. Setting it up was super easy once I was on wifi. I’ll show some comparisons of it with my old phone sometime.