Infegy Blog

The highly anticipated launch of the iPhone 3G drove many overzealous Apple fanatics to wait at AT&T and Apple stores around the country many hours before the stores opened its doors. I’m not afraid to admit that I was one of them. I, as well as many others, spent our July 11th morning in lawn chairs trying to make use of our time as we patiently awaited our opportunity to get our hands on the newest model of the most revolutionary communication device ever created. When 8am finally hit, the coordinated employees waved in a group at a time to purchase the phones. I was in the second group, and was very ready to walk out of the store with a fantastic new iPhone 3G to play with. However, my excitement started to go sour.

The activation was taking a seemingly long amount of time, and I was given the the bad news that the activation servers were overloaded and I’d have to try again at home. I arrive home to plug in my iPhone and received the same error message. My prior cell phone had been deactivated, but my new phone could not be activated. I had to face the harsh reality that my telecommunication availability was at the mercy of Apple’s servers. Thankfully, the issue was resolved in a few hours, and I could enjoy the new device.

I’m a pretty forgiving person, but its truly a shame when great things get overshadowed by bad events. I had a feeling that this fiasco would generate a plethora of bad press. But, after doing some Social Radar research, it didn’t seem to be quite as bad as I was expecting.

I built a chart comparing all chatter of the iPhone 3G to chatter about the iPhone and activation related chatter.

Looking at the chart above, roughly 7-8% of the iPhone chatter on launch day was related to the activation problems. I was surprised, as I assumed it would be much higher. Granted, I tried to cover many ways that the activation fiasco may have been mentioned, and not all may have been captured here. But, I’m confident that this chart gives us an accurate gauge and covers a good majority of it.

Let’s narrow down and do some comparisons. Below is a bar chart of the difference in iPhone and activation problem related chatter on 7/11.

From this chart above, we can see that almost 14% of the chatter was related to the issues. This is still relatively low. However, let’s see a bar chart for this same comparison on 7/14 (three days later).

This chart shows that in just 3 days, this chatter has lowered to only around 8% of the chatter, nearly half as much.

We can conclude that it looks like Apple has been forgiven and people have moved past the issues they had on launch day.

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