The New York Post has an article today on the mania––in the truest sense of the word––surrounding the eventual release of Apple's iPhone, a device that is a phone, digicam, organizer, Internet browser, and iPod wrapped into one sleek-looking package. The Post found people willing to camp, pay, or have sex in trade for the latest and greatest in soon-to-be-ubiquitous personal technology.
Harris Levinson, 34, a video production supervisor for Conde Nast, is paying his brother and two friends $150 each to stand in line at Apple stores in three different states to make sure he gets at least one.
“I have to cover my bases,” said Levinson, who’s dispatched phone-buying surrogates to New York, Kentucky and Tennessee. “What if one of them doesn’t work?”
Levinson's other strategies included "jokingly" asking one of his female friends to sleep with an Apple Genius in trade for an iPhone and handing off his business card to an AT&T employee with a $100 bill attached. Neither gambits worked, unsurprisingly. A plastic surgeon from Long Island is offering to pay for people to wait in line overnight in order to get him a phone. He wants one right before he goes on vacation so he'll have time to "play around with it." If you're going on a 4th of July vacation with a Dr. Harris, get ready for some fun times.
A 21-year-old Pace University student is prepared to camp out on the sidewalk in order to get his iPhone. "It really makes a social statement. I want to be the first to have it.” It does indeed make a social statement.
