Coup era shock! No one dies |as iPhone 6 goes on sale

Relatively few people camped out overnight to be the first in line. No plate-glass store windows caved in under pressure. And the first purchasers found no news cameras waiting to record their ecstasy.

Apple needn’t fear that its phones have lost their buzz (or that Samsung has triumphed after all). What made the difference this time was the sale was well organised and the “early adapters” didn’t have to put up a fight to get at the products. The phones were widely available, making it convenient to buy one close to home no matter where you lived. 

The shops were better prepared, too. Most of the malls announced “queue times”, up to three hours before their doors opened, though an informal Soopsip survey found that some people were in place by 5am outside the malls. At that hour there were almost 20 people in front of iStudio at Digital Gateway opposite Siam Centre, and not many more when it and its sister outlet at Siam Discovery finally opened. 

Also, if your Halloween plans didn’t absolutely require an iPhone 6, you could stay home and order one through the Thai site for Apple’s Online Store – where the phones went on sale at midnight on October 30 but shipment was estimated to take a week. 

AIS had popular actor Jirayu “James Ji” Thangsrisuk at its store at Central Embassy and even that didn’t cause sales to boil up into madness. Someone on Pantip.com reported that the True shop at Central Khon Kaen lacked a crowd “and the bookings were very slow”. 

Pantip and the social networks find lots to discuss even when nothing’s happening, of course, so there was plenty of chatter about the iPhone rollout. It seems that the mobile-phone service providers shared their limited number of units among their branches – but due to the low numbers couldn’t offer much in the way of package deals. 

A bloke who was 20th in line at Central Bangna was disappointed to find few iPhone 6 Plus models at the True store and, of those available, most came with 16 gigabytes of storage and only three had 64GB, everything tied to a True phone-Internet service subscription, of course. He went home and ordered his preferred choice directly from Apple Thailand. 

Anyway, waiting is often the better approach, and not just to make sure no alarming bugs turn up. Once the dust settles there’ll be better deals, like free-interest instalment payments, for example. Banana IT and some iStudio branches have already made arrangements with |K-bank and UOB to offer this. 

At least that’s the compensation we’re chewing on until we can scrape up the coin to buy one.