You Could Wait a Week in Line for iPhone 3G, Or...

There are no lines outside either of the Apple stores here in San Diego. Even if people wanted to line up, the malls probably wouldn't allow it. But the situation is different on the streets of New York, where people have already camped outside the giant cube Apple Store. The line started forming about a week before the July 11 iPhone 3G launch.

Seven days: 168 hours. 10,080 minutes. 604,800 seconds. What else could you possible do with that time:

• Watch 84 two-hour movies. Blockbuster would love you, particularly if Netflix throttled your queue.

• Make love 2,016 times (assuming an average of five minutes per time).
• Walk 840 miles (assuming five miles per hour).
• Fly round trip five times between Washington, D.C. and Seoul, South Korea (assuming 17 hours flight time each way).
• Read 4,032 blog posts (assuming an average of 2.5 minutes).
• Send and read 10,080 text messages or tweets (assuming one every minute).
• Watch "Rick Roll" on YouTube 3,045 times.

The early iPhone 3G line is amusing. It's a friggin' cell phone, people! Get a life. But lifestyle is the point, which is worth my blogging about the line waiters. Human beings are naturally gregarious and seek to belong to something. Those line waiters will gain a sense of community and camaraderie as 8 a.m. on July 11 approaches.

Waiting in line is also an opportunity for some vicarious attention. The first people in iPhone 3G lines will be interviewed over and over this week by reporters and bloggers. For a few days, anyway, they will be special, and all by simply waiting to buy this week's geek gadget.

On Friday ubergeek blogger Robert Scoble wrote about waiting for the original iPhone launch:

I'm an expert on waiting in line for Apple products. My son and I waited 30+ hours in line last year to buy the first iPhone (we were first in line at the Apple store in Palo Alto, CA, which is the one closest to Steve Jobs' home). Personally, the line was more fun than using the product. It'll always be one of the things in my life that I'll remember. We had famous Apple software developers, famous CEOs and venture capitalists waiting in line, and a lot of other fun people, too...Waiting in line for an Apple product is glorious, even if it is idiotic. It's certainly one way to get on Techmeme without writing a blog. Ahh, it'll be a long week of Apple hype.

Robert's sentiments aptly capture the sense of Apple community and being special—and this from Microsoft's most successful blogger (now moved on from the company to video blogging for Fast Company). In moving to the Mac, Robert made a digital lifestyle choice, as is waiting in line for either iPhone 2G or 3G.

Apple marketing works—drawing people to wait for days in the heat and humidity for a product—because the company sells a lifestyle and sense of community with it. Lifestyle is the hallmark of all successful products or brands.

I spent several summers in Manhattan during the 1980s. One August night, I found people camped along 33rd and 34th streets and 8th Avenue. There were hundreds of people. Deadheads filled cement nooks and crannies to wait for a Grateful Dead concert a few days later at Madison Square Garden. Grateful Dead and its Deadhead followers were all about lifestyle, around music, drugs and tie-dye clothing.

Deadheads camped out on New York streets long before the Macheads. But iPhone users aren't all Mac users. So there needs to be a better moniker. Perhaps, phoneys or iphoneys. I can't think of a really good name. Can you? Please share in the comments.

Posted by Joe Wilcox on July 7, 2008 12:00 AM