Apple’s most hard-core fans were out in force at stores around Los Angeles and the Bay Area on Thursday night, hours before the iPhone 5s and 5c were scheduled to go on sale at 8 a.m. Friday.
About 55 people were waiting outside the Apple store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica by 10:30 p.m., with the first arriving at 2:30 p.m.
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Friday marks the first day customers can buy the new high-end iPhone 5s, which features a new fingerprint scanner, an upgraded camera and a much faster processor. The iPhone 5c, which comes in five colors and has a plastic casing, had been available as a pre-order and was scheduled to be delivered starting Friday.
For folks in line Thursday, the new gold iPhone 5s seemed to be the main choice. That means there could be a lot of disappointed Apple fans on Friday, with rumblings that supplies of the gold iPhone 5s are in extremely short supply.
Indeed, the ship date for the gold iPhone was pushed back to October within minutes of the 5s going on sale shortly after midnight.
Things at the Santa Monica store were relatively calm until a store employee approached to survey which phones people wanted. By the time she got to the 14th person in line, she warned that the coveted gold iPhone 5s would likely be sold out by then.
That — coupled with the news that many of the first people in line were planning on buying two gold iPhones — angered those further back, including 20-year-old Kassandra Allen.
“Why do they need two? Why why why? That’s so selfish, seriously,” she said in disbelief.
Allen, a student at the Art Institute, was about the 20th person in line after arriving around 8 p.m.
“I should have come here earlier,” she lamented. “I just wanted the gold. I’m Jamaican, I love gold.”
Nwabudike Washington, a new friend she’d made in line, was also upset by the gold iPhone shortage.
“I’ve had the white, I’ve had the black, I haven’t had the gold. It just looks very exclusive,” the 23-year-old from Culver City said. “I’m gonna need every prayer, hope I can get. I need to call up on Jesus. He needs to answer this call.”
Soon, though, Washington appeared in better spirits: He’d ordered a large pepperoni pizza, which he had delivered to the Apple store.
Others had been paid to wait.
One man, who declined to give his name, said he had been standing outside the nearby Barnes & Noble store when he had been approached by a man in a plaid shirt offering him cash and a McDonald’s hamburger to wait in line for him.
“We haven’t talked about how much he’s going to pay me,” he said. “I’m hoping good money though. … Hopefully the guy will be generous.”
Danny Lopez, 27, was first in line at the Promenade and said people had offered him dinner to give up his spot in line. He refused, but said he would do so for $ 1,000.
Over at the Grove in the Fairfax District, nearly 40 people were waiting on the sidewalk outside the mall at 11:15 p.m. (the Grove wasn’t allowing customers onto the property until 4 a.m.).
Geno Watson, 30, arrived at 6 p.m. with a folding chair hoping to get a slate gray iPhone 5s. He said he never considered the 5c, which he called a “junior high, high schoolish” phone.
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