(Above: PC World's Amber Bouman waiting in the iLine at San Francisco's Union Square Apple Store...and leaning, appropriately enough, against an iPod ad.)
I'm not sure where the longest iLine in the world is, but I can't imagine that there are any that are...iLinier than the one here in San Francisco's Union Square. I was going to say I was at the Apple Store, but I'm actually a long way from it, part of a teeming throng of folks.
And while the iLine I waited in this morning over at the Stonestown Galleria was pretty sedate, this one is a zoo. There are clowns here. There are people with their dogs. A meaningful percentage of the waiters have notebooks with 'em (hey, the Apple Store's Wi-Fi stretches all the way down here). There are TV crews and wacky picketers and, as my colleague Melissa Perenson reported last night, a transportable mini-golf course.
The passers-by who aren't that interested in iPhones are part of the action. Some of them are mocking us. One asked just what was so special about this phone. "It does the dishes" and "It blasts through kidney stones" were two of the answers she got.
You can even hear the word "iPhone" escaping from passing cars...
Sitting here blogging, I've been approached by a pollster, a Reuters reporter, and Sam Levin of Cool Mac Picks, who doesn't have an iPhone yet but does have several accessories.
It's 4:27pm here--90 minutes to go, more or less, until the doors open. I'm the 83rd person in line. I intend to leave with one 8GB iPhone and one 4GB one--we'll see...
