Me Can't Handle It

Apple has seriously flubbed their launch of MobileMe and iPhone. Their stuff is dead slow and their updates are bricking iPhones and iTouches. I'm sure they're going to tell everyone that they've been hacked - a day0 hack on this day has got to be a treasure for any black hat. But I suspect that the same thing that didn't work when Jobs was announcing a month ago crapped out today.

Remember we were hearing that the new iPhones have been out almost a year already? My spidey senses were telling me something wasn't quite done if they didn't release the same day they announced. But hey, it's a reasonable way to get a month of buzz right? Who could fault anyone with a 200 buck superphone? Sure, wait a month. Surely they knew what kind of activation nightmare was to come. Surely they were overprepared. Yeah right. It looks like a total disaster of a launch. Check out this comment from the Macworld forums:

This has been a horrible week for Apple, and it has only gotten worse with the 3G activation disasters and 2.0 upgrade bricking fiasco.
 
Attention Macworld: start doing some journalism!! The current articles on your website read like Apple PR and do not reflect reality!! This is quite possibly the worst rollout in Apple's history. To have 36+ hours of downtime for a service that was already overpriced and poor is simply disastrous and is not going to win new customers. It is simply not reliable; why should users pay $99/year for webmail that is subject to this kind of downtime when gmail is free and solid.
 
To add insult to injury, the 2.0 bricking epidemic is just outrageous. To not build in any way for users to restore their old OS is just unconscionable. These are phones, not iPods Apple! People rely on their phones and their webmail to communicate, and you've broken both for millions of people within a 48 hour period. To the apologists who say "oh, just give them time, there's bound to be problems on the first day" - I say no, that's not right. Apple should do load testing and anticipate the kind of demand they're going to see (it should be obvious). If they can't prepare adequately, then they shouldn't do this kind of rollout. It's extremely unprofessional.
 
This is disgraceful, and a serious tarnish on Apple's reputation. "It just works," my ass!!
 
Wake up Macworld - get on the ball and start reporting this!!! The MobileMe crisis is nearly 2 days old now!

Oof!

Me.com is slashdotted. So here's the meme, which is caveman talk for Me. Me slow. Me stupid. Me having hard time scaling. Me not all me cracked up to be.

Endgadget has even more sour news.

 

In a repeat of last year's problems, it looks like the insane demand for the iPhone 3G has taken its toll on Apple's iTunes activation servers -- that's a picture of iTunes locking up in the Chicago AT&T flagship earlier this morning. We're hearing that the servers are now definitely down after being intermittently active for the past few hours, and that customers are either being turned away or sent home from both Apple and AT&T stores to activate at home using iTunes. That's especially interesting since it suggests that AT&T was insisting on in-store activation to thwart unlockers, but for right now the real news is that lots of eager iPhone 3G buyers are stuck with two useless phones, since upgrading from a first-gen unit disables the SIM. Ouch. We'll keep you updated.

Yikee. 809 Comments!