Apparently thousands of people lined up for many many hours before the "release" of the new iPhone 5s and 5c today.
Why the F would anyone do that?
Many of the are resellers.. there are reports about people buying a few phones and selling them for a considerable profit on ebay/craigslist. Many of them are Apple fanboys.. they will always do this stupid thing... and others are being paid by Apple to stand there to fill the lines after the whole Verizon launch failure a few years back. It has always been part of the Apple marketing ploy. There are next to no lines outside the the major PR cities of New York, LA, London and so on.
They had a problem back in the day when the iPhone got on Verizon network in the US... there was no lines outside one store in New York. Why? Hype. Was funny to watch the fanboy media of CNBC and Bloomberg going to a Verizon shop in the American Mall or something like that, and the only person outside the store waiting was an employee.
The Apple pre-orders on the 5C have been bad.. very bad. Comments coming out from the big French phone companies are saying pre-orders are in the hundreds... and the reservations for the new iPhones in China have only been around 100k, which if true, is pathetically bad considering there are over 300 million smartphone users in China.
I have no doubt that people will buy the phones, but it will not be many new customers but people upgrading from the 4S and lower and their contracts are up. A few will upgrade from the 5 cause they are fanboys, and even a few might actually be stupid enough to go from the 5 to the 5C.. ITS THE SAME PHONE!!! you morons!!!.. but as for gaining a massive amount of new customers.. I doubt it, especially outside the US. The phones are simply too expensive since in most of the world you have to pay the full price, which is for even the "cheap" iPhone 5C is over 700 bucks in most countries.
I would suspect that Apple would sell between 4-6 million phones over the weekend, but that number should if you believe the Apple propaganda, that number should be much higher since for the first time China, their supposed second biggest market, is on the first day of release. So the real number should be 10+ million considering China. It wont be.
