From my personal observation, with out reading any of the documentation, this is what I observed…

Last Thursday at some point I update iTunes to 7.7. Easy as pie.

Roughly at 10am the next day (Friday) the iPhone 2.0 software was released for general consumption (lets ignore the thursday leak…) via iTunes.

I dock my phone with the macbook pro.

I let it sync the iPhone.

I press “update software.”

*begin headache*.

The update does the following.
1. It backs up all data on your phone.
2. It wipes your phone of all data.
3. It installs the new software.
4. It tries to authenticate with Apple.

Steps 1 through 3 went very quickly.
Step 4 took 3+ hours.

This is where I’m upset.
Apple knows how many iPhone’s they’ve sold.
They also know how many 2nd generation iPhone’s they were shipping to retailers.
If you have spent the last 6 months (yes, they have, I know for a fact) testing the iPhone 2 software with select customers (yes, they have, I know for a fact, I’m one of them)…

Then as Apple, shouldn’t you know **EXACTLY** how much bandwidth and processor cycles you’ll need on friday to support the existing customer base and new customer base who are trying to update their phones?

I mean… Its math right? its not magic… its not… a guessing game?
Right?

As I said, at approx 10am Friday, I updated my phone, it took 3 hours to go from firmware 2.0 install to completing authentication with apple’s servers to allow me to use my phone, as a phone.

This is unacceptable.

Sure, around 1pm, or 2pm, it started working again, but it wasn’t seemless.
it wasn’t even “well communicated”.

The error messages, as you can see in my previous post are esoteric and confusing. “Error number -4″ and error number -9000 something…

I’m a IT guy. I read error messages for a living. These error messages are shit. (mostly cause you can’t copy and paste from a popup item like that in to google and find an answer)

They’re not explanitory of the problem.
They don’t offer a clear answer. “Try again later”

“why?” you ask?
Cause steve jobs hates you, I guess???

So, for the next 3 hours, between all of the other shit I had to do during my day, I kept attempting to get apple to accept my phone as “real”.

For 3 hours I wondered if I had a brick sitting on my desk, that a year ago cost me 600 dollars…
Would they accept a brick for a $200 phone today? The obvious chain of thought flowed through my mind, and I wondered if I would have to turn on my old samsung phone, which never needed a hard-reinstall of new software, ever… (let alone never randomly crashed when i was sending a text message).

All said and done.
It works. The Application store is a model of good-design. It simply “works”.
Apple has an amazing product, thats a model of what we all should expect in our “mobile devices” for the next few years. every higher end phone you will find on the market for the next year is a direct response to the iphone, let alone the iphone 2. Android is a competitor, and maybe symbian is one also after the opensource release recently. But apple, as always, (if you ignore the **MASSSIVE* fuck up friday) makes a product that you’re able to just plug in, and have work.

It wasn’t perfect. I’m not at all happy. but I have a feeling they learned their lesson…. or at least I can hope.