Here's an idea I've been meaning to pass on to Will Smith; lobby for a name change to iMaxPC. The reasoning is simple, any product preceded with an 'i' becomes instantly fashionable and a must-have item. And the best part about this idea is that if I doof up part of an article, no one will care because, hey, there's an i on the cover! Hype makes for a wonderful sales tool, capable of selling 525,000 iPhones in 3 days amid mixed reviews (greatest phone ever or too many missing features?), reports of activation woes, and incompatibility with 64-bit versions of Vista and XP.
But I digress, I didn't rush out and buy an iPhone, I don't plan on picking up an iPhone, and I'm not going to analyze what's being said about the iPhone (that would be redundant). Instead, I want to chat about this EBay culture we live in, where every hyped tech toy finds its way out of retail inventories and into inflated auctions. If you want the latest gear, you can either pitch a tent in front of your local electronics store and wait 12+ hours, or head over to EBay and be hornswoggled by those that did.
Now, I have no beef with anyone looking to make a quick buck. Afterall, it's legal, it makes good business sense, and arguably the ones most deserving of scrutiny are the bidders that create a market for these inflated auctions. Yet, I can't help but feel amused, nay, overjoyed at seeing the tables turned on one would-be EBayer who, if she had her way, would have cleaned an AT&T store out of $100,000 worth of iPhones for the sole purpose of hawking them online. Such excessive greed certainly warrants a karmic response, and that's exactly what she got. Rather than tell you what happened, this is one video you really should watch for yourself...
Comments are closed on this article
bcweir
July 10, 2007 at 1:09pm
I had no idea that there are people willing to WAIT IN LINE to get RAPED by AT&T and APPLE.
VoodooChicken
July 09, 2007 at 7:09am
Anyone remember the Raptor controversy 10 years ago? I forget which publishers were involved, but basically there were to F-22 Raptor games, and pretty much the only difference in the titles was an "i" I can't remember if it was iF-22 or iRaptor (neither one made sense to me), but that was back when I was reading PCGamer which had a cover story on it.
----------------------------------------------------------
Look behind you! A THREE-headed monkey!!!!!!!!
mothslaw
July 07, 2007 at 4:16pm
This makes me so happy. I'm tired of having to fight to get the latest tech toys in the stores only because someone (who doesn't need or want it for themselves) has grabbed them all to make a quick buck. I've waited in those lines only to get to the front and find out that they just sold the last
. I personally don't want an iPhone but this is poetic justice. The kid in the front of the line deserves the free phone. - mothslaw
elburro
July 08, 2007 at 6:18pm
I'm glad someone finally pointed out this crazy icraze as i like to call it. Put the letter i in front of any old product and all of a sudden everyone wants it so they can show off how cool they are. I think I'm going to put i in front of my name so I'll be supercool and super popular.
Morichalion
July 07, 2007 at 5:59am
There's so many ways for that situation to go wrong. Remember the Playstation 3 release? People got mugged over that machine.
Just imagine how pissed the people in line would've been if this woman got her way. Would she have been able to get back to her car, even? People would've been picking iPhones off her mashed-up corpse...
Gigahertz17
July 07, 2007 at 2:52am
I saw this awhile back, she was pretty stupid to think they wouldn't enforce a 1 iPhone per customer.
I don't know how she planned to buy 100K worth of phones when she only had $16,000. If you watch the video again, he says she showed up to the store with 16K cash in hand.
Print
