I stayed up to early morning hours of Friday October 7th to order an iPhone 4S. I had already decided on a White one with 32GB of storage. As a current iPhone 3GS owner I had been eligible to upgrade since the early part of September.

At 1:01 AM I promptly refreshed the Apple Online Store homepage to be greeted with the standard “We’ll be back soon” message. While I waited I headed over to twitter to see if any other followers were running into the same thing.

Forward to 1:32 AM and the store is still not up. I respond back to Chris Breen about his complaint about the store being down “@BodyofBreen imagine how east cost people feel. #iPhone4S #applestoredown”. No reply back, but he was on Pacific Time and far better off than the rest of us. It’s at this point I decided to give up for the moment and get some rest. I felt I was in for a long wait.

2:25 AM I wake startled to find that the store was up, but after numerous attempts I can’t get past the eligibility screen. I try AT&T and still no luck. Errors and more errors until 3:01 AM, I get a message that an iPhone had been reserved and that an email would notify me when I could come back to Apple Store and place my order. Not trusting system, I try one more time and get the same message. Well nothing more to do, but back to bed and get some rest.

4:53 AM I get the email telling me the Apple Store is ready for me. I have until Saturday October 8th 5:00PDT to order. I start the process yet again, but run into the biggest issue of the day. I can’t change my shipping address. I try about everything possible for the next hour to make a change in shipping, no luck. I am completely frustrated as I can’t be home on the 14th of October and wait for an iPhone. Why can’t I ship it to my work address? I go back to bed.

10:26 AM I attempt to pre-order via AT&T. I get to the shipping address and find I cannot change it via AT&T either. I scroll down and discover that “for security reasons” I can only have the phone shipped to the billing address of record. I am dumbfounded as why this is a policy, but I play the game. I switch my billing address to my work address and at 10:48 AM my order is complete.

1:44 PM my email Order Acknowledgment arrives solidifying my order. As of this post my iPhone 4S has yet to ship, but I expect it to. I am hearing that people ordering Black 16GB models have received notification. In fact a co-worker ordered a 1 black model and 1 white model, with the shipping confirmation coming for the black model.

The pre-order experience was far from flawless. I believe AT&T was to blame for a lot of the issues. Apple had a great back up plan in place this time. Verizon and Sprint from what I read had little problems, which says a lot about those two companies. Obviously Apple did not intend for customers to wait as long as I did to fill an order. At this point I need a few naps to recover all the lost sleep. Good Night.