iPhone: The Agony and the Ecstasy

So I decided that today was the day to get a new phone — a shiny, happy iPhone 3G.

Little did I know that, at about the same time, the gremlins decided that today was the day to screw with me...

The local AT&T store was still out of stock, but we're lucky enough to have two Apple stores in Orlando. I called the Apple store at the closest mall to me while driving there to check availability and wait time. I waited on the phone for over 30 minutes, but at least I got a prompt every thirty seconds or so telling me how many calls were ahead of me in the queue. After getting to a person, I found out that they had plenty of phones in stock but the customer queue was about 4 or 5 hours long! By the time the call was done I was in front of the mall.

I called the other Apple store at another mall about 5 miles away. They said they had plenty of inventory but almost no line. Go figure! So I headed over there like... well, let's just say 'expeditiously'.

I walked through the mall, entered the queue, and waited for 45 minutes to get into the store escorted by a guy in a pale blue iPhone 3G tee shirt and flip flops. This would be my 'activation assistant'. Then the real fun began.

After telling the pale blue tee shirt guy that I wanted a black 16GB iPhone and the 900 minute calling plan, he gets the device and proceeds to scan in the serial number and SIM card information printed on the box. Then the activation process starts. He collects my existing phone number and my SSN last 4, and verifies my address from my driver's license. All of this was collected in the little mobile POS device. POS is an acronym for point of sale, although another possibility soon came to mind.

Of course, there was something on my account that thwarted the normal activation process. The handheld POS came back with an error, and so Mr. blue tee shirt called AT&T support. The guy on the phone got my account set up with the new SIM and device information, and changed the rate plan. OK, so a little snag but we recovered well. Or so I thought...

Then Mr. blue tee shirt tried to ring up the phone so I could pay for it. Whoops! The device rings up at $499. The price is supposed to be $299. Why the difference? According to the POS terminal, I don't qualify for the 'upgrade price' on the iPhone and have to pay full price, which is $200 more, and I still have to sign a 2 year contract. 

Well, of course, I say that this is not acceptable. You see, I had heard about this pricing issue and went over to my AT&T store to verify that I qualified for the upgrade price. So why the change of tune now? According to the Apple guy, it's all AT&T's fault since their system is the one that says yea or nay to the upgrade based upon my account status. So he calls AT&T again to track it down.

15 minutes later, he's still on hold. Thinking he got mis-routed, he tries again.

35 minutes later, his call is answered and the dialog begins. After a while, it's determined that when the first agent activated the iPhone he made a mistake and went too far by assigning the iPhone service plan. When the Apple system called the AT&T system, it looked like my account already had an iPhone 3G on it, thus I didn't qualify for a 'second' upgrade.

Mr. blue tee shirt and the AT&T rep worked the problem for about 3 hours, and there was no possible way that they could find to activate the account for the upgrade price. There was no override capability for the AT&T system, nor was there a way for the Apple store to adjust the iPhone price.

Well, because the iPhone was activated, my working Blackberry worked no more. So now I had no phone and the prospects were dim.  I suggested that they try to add the iPhone as a second line, cancel the first line and move the phone number over. This looked like it would work, but no, it couldn't be that easy. See, the Apple POS system insisted that the iPhone was already sold and couldn't be sold again.

In the end, the Apple folks gave me a new iPhone to get around this problem. They had to pull the SIM from the first one and put it in the second one to make it work. Unfortunately, they ran out of the black phones an hour before and so I had to take a white one. They gave me a voucher written on the back of a business card to exchange the white one for a new black one when more were in stock.

In the end, I spent over 5 hours and 45 minutes getting the iPhone working; 45 minutes in line and 5 hours pulling hair through the sales and activation process. Apple is going to have to dump two perfectly good 16GB iPhones and probably resell them as refurbished. I have to go back to the store and exchange the phone again (hopefully this time they'll just swap the SIM).

I have a working phone, and it's nice, but all of this leaves me wondering why these systems are so brittle and so restrictive. They've had a long, long time to plan and test. What's the excuse?

Better, or just different?

While I've been setting up my new Macbook Pro, I've been thinking about why computers are so freaking hard for most people to understand.

The Mac, of course, is supposed to be the paragon of human interface goodness. As I lifted the lid and booted the machine for the first time, choirs of angels were supposed to be singing and dazzling rays of light were supposed to be washing over my pudgy face. Here I was, finally liberated from the dreaded Windows PC that held me in shackles for all of these years. Hallelujah!

However, being completely objective — which is hard to do with a shiny new (and expensive) piece of hardware sitting in front of you — I can't say that using OS X is much easier than using Windows. As I've been attaching the machine to my network, adding printers, configuring preferences, and performing other mundane tasks associated with getting a new computer set up, I've encountered lots of stuff that puzzled me and certainly would be undecipherable to the average person.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater. The overall Mac experience is much, much better than any PC I've worked on. The reliability and security of UNIX-based OS X is a huge improvement over Windows, the amount of software that you get with the machine is incredible, and the total package is tight and pretty.

However, I've come across many cryptic dialog boxes, I've needed to try things multiple times, I've had to repair keychains, and I've spent a fair amount of time Googling to validate problems and find solutions. Once you learn some tricks the answers seem obvious, but until then you could spend a lot of time scratching your head.

I think a major source of this problem is that a computer, as Alan Turing taught us, is an 'anything machine'. Unlike a calculator, a car, or an iPod which has a few basic capabilities, computers can be extended with programs to do thousands of different things. Because of this, no two computers are alike; someone bought the same model Macbook I did on the same day last week, but I guarantee that by now our machines have lots of different software in them. Additionally, because computers can interface to so many things, the differences multiply by the number of printers, network routers, external storage systems, cameras, portable media players, and other types of peripherals that they have to deal with. The probability of any two computers being completely alike within a week of purchase is basically zero.

All of this different software and all of these different peripherals lead to complexity and inconsistency. There are just too many options, too many choices, too many potential conflicts. There's no rule book that says, for example, if you're building a network router, here are the five items that should be user-configurable. In fact, it's just the opposite; in an attempt to gain market share companies try to make their products different, try to add new features, and as a result end up putting a hundred knobs on something that would work almost as well with two. Look at the millions of ways you can configure Microsoft Office! Does anyone really need every one of those options? Of course not, but when you want that one specific option you're going to complain if it's not there. (I'm sure that somewhere there is someone who wants to have page numbers only on every 7th page!)

So we have millions of dialog boxes, each designed with its own sense of a task flow and vocabulary that is relevant to the program or peripheral for which it was designed but not obvious to the unacquainted. As a result, we have billions of users getting confused and potentially screwing up, costing time and money. Yet overall the balance pays off, so people put up with the crap and try to deal with it as best they can. Sometimes they have to call Geek Squad, or a relative who can fix it for them. Sometimes they just live with the problem — I know people who are OK with restarting their computer multiple times a day because it locks up or drops the Internet connection!

I'm going on, I know, so I'll wrap this up by saying that Apple can't really solve this fundamental problem. No single company can. If things ever do get easier, it's going to take some more advanced logic that will hide all of these complexities from the user, not just present them in a prettier dialog box. Something that can analyze all of the dependencies and potential issues and automatically make the best decision based on the intent of the user rather than their direct input. This is a problem that's worth solving!