Just about 16 years ago — on June 29, 2007 — the internet was introduced to a new microcelebrity. His name was Greg Packer, and he was so desperate to get an iPhone he camped out in front of Apple's flagship 5th Avenue store in New York for four days.
He turned out to be a little bit of a weirdo.
But!
The fact remains that behind him on that day 192 months ago, a line curled around the block.
Here's what the line looked like in New York that day:
Here's what the line for the same product looked like when it launched in France five months later:
These lines, and the hundreds of other lines like them all over the planet, would return year after year when Apple launched new iPhones and later the iPad.
The hype was real.
All of it stemmed, of course, from history's greatest product announcement: Steve Jobs' January 9, 2007, launch of the first iPhone.
And that announcement followed months of anticipatory coverage about what was coming next from Apple and the man who gave us the iMac and the iPod.
Take a moment and compare all that with today.
Did you even know, before you opened this post, that today, Apple is launching another massive new product?
It is! My colleague Hasan Chowdhury writes: "On Monday, Apple is set to begin its annual Worldwide Developers Conference at its Cupertino, California, headquarters, where it is expected to unveil its mixed-reality headset, which has been years in the making. The stakes couldn't be higher."
"The headset," Chowdhury continues, "which could be named Reality One and resemble a set of ski goggles, represents Apple's first major step towards a post-iPhone world — one that seeks to offer a more immersive experience of the web by giving people a gateway tool to a virtual and augmented reality."
So this is a very big deal for a very big company with a long history of huge product launches.
And yet, the anti-hype is real. And it makes you wonder whether trouble is looming for Apple. The company thinks so. In April, Bloomberg reported that Apple initially thought it would sell about 3 million units. Now it's hoping for 900,000. The Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, meanwhile, is pegging the number closer to 150,000.
Apple sells about 200 million iPhones a year. So sales like that aren't going to have a meaningful impact.
Meanwhile, Siri sure still seems a lot dumber than ChatGPT, doesn't it?
