As you might have guessed, I could not resist having a look at the line for the iphone at the Grove shopping mall/village/whatever. Here’s an overhead shot of a cluster near the Apple Store’s entrance just after the launch at 6:00pm:
(Click for larger.)
What you can’t hear is people cheering as people either enter or emerge (with their new acquisition) from the store (I’m not sure which). It’s not everyday you see this many people (in a very long line indeed – see one of four segments at right) waiting to shell out so much money for something that they all know will be very obsolete a year from now. They just want to be part of what is (seriously for a moment now) a true landmark event in the history of personal consumer technology. The iphone is truly revolutionary. Not needing to feel part of the revolution just yet, I myself will wait a few years at least for the improvements to be made, and the prices to plummet. I was just in the area to look at the crowd on the way to dinner.
As Xeni of Boing Boing says (in an amusingly gushing report from same event pictured above):
“It isn’t hype if the product lives up to it.”
-cvj
Thanks Clifford. My name gets spelled all kinds of wrong all the time, but it doesn’t bother me. I just finished reading a biography of Murray Gell-Mann, “Strange Beauty”. He has the obnoxious habit of correcting people’s pronunciation. He also analyzes everybody’s last name and tells them what it means and how to pronounce it. (His own last name had its pronunciation and spelling changed by his dad. It was originally Gellman, a fairly common German / Jewish name. So people teased him by using similar names, for example, John-Son.) In tribute to Gell-Mann, “Brannen” is English. It means Bran’s kin. The Bran is the bird now known as the raven.
I’ve got another mass formulas planned for release this year having to do with the baryon resonances. The mesons are very difficult to classify.
The iPhone madness on eBay, which saw prices around double the list price of $600 for the larger memory unit, has collapsed. The company illustrator is planning on taking his units back to the store for a refund. He’s quite depressed though he’s trying not to show it, given that the event is a source of great laughter at the company.
He should have known that it was an iffy proposition when there wasn’t a line at the store to buy them. The company I work at specializes in heavy industrial machinery (i.e. 10,000 to a few million kg). These sometimes can be bought very cheaply at auction because few people can move them. iPhones are a commodity and quite easy to transport.
Congratulations! (Correction done, btw)
-cvj
The crazy company I work at makes a living by buying and selling things. The company illustrator dropped by the mall and bought two iPhones. He’s planning on selling them on eBay for a quick profit. The rest of us are a little worried, but right now it looks like he’s in the black.
Also, remember the “Star of David” I did using your LaTex last Christmas? The math behind it was apparently attractive. I self published the original article back in May 2006 and it already has 4 citations in the journals. I think this may be a record for a 50-year old guy with no PhD who wears a hard hat at work. Which reminds me, my last name actually is spelt “Brannen”.