On the morning of Friday, June 11th, Apple Inc. (née Apple Computer Inc.) released the latest generation of the iPhone, an event feted as “The Second Coming of the Jesusphone”, not to be taken lightly. Since their first big forays into the consumer electronics market, Apple’s deftly honed marketing pitchfork—the three points of secrecy, high-end technology, and minimalist eye candy—has guaranteed that both mainstream media and grassroots fanboy buzz abound with the announcement and launch of each new product. iPhone hysteria is something else, though. While it doesn’t foster gibbering, hair-ripping, Sinatra/Beatles hysteria, the iPhone wants to be part of your everyday life; it wants to do everything for you; it wants to be like air, water, and electricity; which, I’d argue, makes it more zeitgeisty.

Sold on the promise of a free spot in line, I accompany my roommate Anthony, a journalist for a technology blog, to product launch ground zero, the Apple Store on Stockton Street. Unlike the other hundreds of people waiting, my roommate isn’t here for an iPhone; he is on a calculated PR mission, with the aim of handing out two hundred donuts and six gallons of coffee to those who had showed up to wait for hours in line in order to get one, god knows why, on the first day. Two hundred donuts is a lot, especially when you consider how you feel after your third. Anthony’s goal is to get on local TV.

It’s mid-fifty degrees and dark when we arrive at four AM to meet up with my roommate’s co-worker, who has been holding our place in line since midnight. I express some worry that we might be called out for cutting, but it ends up irrelevant, as half of the line-sitters are soundly asleep in tents and sleeping bags, having constructed a favela of tents, sleeping bags, and blanket lean-tos. Through my exhaustion, I’m able to identify this as Zeitgeisty Moment #1: “Now It Is The Elite Image-Conscious Yuppies Who Are The Ones Sleeping on The Filthy Sidewalk”. Their sleep comes in spite of interruptions, as every now and then passing cars honk and shout, early morning news reporters strafe the line with cameras and set lights that look like silver umbrellas, and the more vivacious sitters, who regard the whole thing as a kind of urban picnic and are determined to stay awake, wing-tackle one another and hurl foam footballs through the air. I get hit in the shoulder blade by a frisbee, but decide to throw it back to them with an insincere grin—I’m going to be stuck with them for a long time.

Conventional wisdom has it that the people who camp out in lines, whether for Star Wars tickets, video games, or gadgets, are cast from roughly the same die: yuppies and fanboys with disposable lifestyles. In practice that’s about forty percent true, but this line is a surprisingly diverse (though still far from representative) sample of San Francisco males. Ahead of us, the twentysomething wearing a corduroy jacket and black frames blares ironic pop and unironic house from his MacBook Pro as loud as it will go, which is not very. An Asian guy with hair pomaded to a little soft-serve point naps in a canvas butterfly chair. The picnickers behind us wear stranglingly tight silkscreened shirts, and if it weren’t for their tent, they would look like they were in line for a show at the Mezzanine. Three Latino guys play cards a few spots back. Nearly everyone works in the tech industry, and I observe more than a few conversations in which two people who think they’re strangers realize they aren’t. (Given the mechanically uniform content of the conversations—mobile this, developer’s conference that—it shouldn’t surprise anybody, but it does.)

On top of whatever other things they’ve brought to make the eight-hour wait as close to sitting in their own living room as possible, the pilgrims have brought along their own gadgets. Many are spending their final moments with the very devices that the iPhone is designed to render obsolete: Blackberrys, RAZRs, Sidekicks, Treos, a dual-sliding Helio Ocean, the Nokia N-Series, several battered first-generation iPhones, and even a few ancient plastic Pieces-of-Shit, one of which belongs to my roommate, who, working in the tech industry, claims that an obsolete Piece-of-Shit usually draws more gasps and stares and unsolicited conversation than any brand new gadget, which is part of the reason why he’s biting the bullet and upgrading like the rest of us. Here, gadget-love forms a basis for bonding, with people relating horror stories of how their device has catastrophically failed them, the drops and crashes they’ve survived, as well as the things they’ll miss (cheap rates, user-replaceable batteries, old phone contracts), the things they know their new model will lack. Which, ding-ding!, brings us to Zeitgeisty Moment #2: “Now We Are Talking About Gadgets The Way We Used to Talk About Our Children, Pets, or Exes”. Most seem so content clicking away at their lesser gizmos that one wonders about the rush to replace these things. Why not wait until the screens go dark? If it ain’t broke, what are you trying to fix?

Then you actually pick up one of these goddamn fucking iPhones.

Can You Imagine If This Thing Were, Say, A Dishwasher

In appearance, functionality, and sheer eye-popping factor, the Jesusphone is a phone in the same way that a communion wafer is a cracker. The design reflects a purity of high-end producthood that is unmatched even by earlier Apple efforts: steel sheen and glass gloss with no gaps or sharp corners, an obsidian façade, a band of chrome along the border. The face of the device, when asleep, is rectangular with rounded corners, and the single frontal button is a shallowly recessed circle enclosing a square with rounded corners. Caress it horizontally across the surface, and a home screen appears, boasting an array of a dozen-and-a-half squares of light, naturally, with rounded corners. It tickles the eye. You can glide your finger around the edge smoothly, except for where you meet the ringer-off switch, which sends a delicious joybuzz to your finger when flicked. The message here is not one of Techne, but Eros. On sheer aesthetics, there are few people this device is not intended to appeal to. Its cachet and swiss army knife versatility makes it a seductive no-brainer for early adopters, geeks, and the platinum clientele—largely white and largely male. Women love it too, and in the same sex-charged way. Meanwhile the kids are in rapture. A YouTube search yields several dozen home videos of babies and toddlers from Russia, Spain, and Japan, flicking and poking and gaping at the touch-sensitive candylights. (One particularly heart-ripping video opens with a wailing baby who, unconsoled by his mother’s voice, becomes immediately pacified once she places an iPhone in front of him; he starts crying again the moment she takes it away, then becomes pacified again when she gives it back, etc. etc., and you realize that this is sort of a game for the mother, and that she doesn’t really seem aware of how sad what she’s doing is.) “So simple a child could use it” is the obvious thing that comes to mind, but what this really demonstrates is that the iPhone’s appeal is so primal that children want to use it, and enjoy it as pure toy. There’s nothing at all linguistic about it; the design bypasses the brain entirely and goes straight for where we, especially we males, are so presumably vulnerable: the eyes and the groin.

Yes, the iPhone is fully positioned as a dressing for the cock. And there’s definitely something irrational and obscene in the act of taking it out in public, the ostentation and excess of it, it really does feel like you’re narcissistically exposing yourself, playing with your glossy, perfectly formed, precious instrument—though there’s also a hint of prissiness to it, a missing danger factor which, in other phallic surrogates, would be supplied by a roaring engine or a loud bang.

So the paradox of the iPhone is that the design itself is cool, but it’s not particularly cool to admit that you think the iPhone is cool. In this way, the iPhone holds a type of hermetic cachet comparable to Radiohead’s. We line-sitters, and others who rate the iPhone’s coolness quite highly, are occupying like the lower 2% of American coolness at the moment. The only people who believe that it endows them with a halo of sexy trendiness are the same people who believe that high end consumer products can confer coolness, which pretty much takes them out of the running. Everyone here has to deal with the embarrassment of being seen with a device whose coolness is bound to come at the cost of your own.

Never mind that, though. You can check Muni schedules on this thing. Voicemail shows up graphically, in a list—I mean, of course. You can take notes, look for nearby restaurants, check your calendar, listen to music. You can wave it around to make lightsaber sounds. Let us play.

Morning by Jobs

The wildfires, which show no signs of slowing, have lately given the sunlight a hazy cantaloupe color, and when you’ve been up at a stupid hour and standing still for eight-plus hours and the sun comes up and illuminates the matte steel Apple Store sign, it’s as if Steve Jobs has coordinated the sunlight himself, for this very event, for us, or at least cut a deal with God to make it happen this way. This, from a marketing perspective, is pretty much precisely the intended effect of this sort of event.

Our little donut shrine is doing brisk traffic. The business manager of my roommate’s blog has decided not to go up and down the line handing the donuts, but instead let the people come to us. (”We want a crowd,” he says, taking a cue from Apple themselves.) Most people ask politely if they can have a donut, even though the boxes are obviously laid out for public accessibility, and then toast us with it in acknowledgement. A trembling homeless man picks his up with a napkin. Word gets out, people gather, and so yes, we end up forming a sort of line within the line, people who are willing to wait their turn to get the spike of sugar and caffeine that will enable them to last the rest of the wait. It causes some sidewalk congestion, and people on their way to work shoulder their way around us with a look on their faces that expresses disdain for yuppies and disdain for consumerism and disdain for trendy technology—perhaps well deserved, though on the other hand, it’s also like, Come on, dude, you work in the Financial District.

At 7 AM the Apple Store employees emerge (“Are they opening early???”) with carts of Vitamin Water to hand out to the faithful. Only we’ve already done it, and are quite smug about it—though this time, the sight of uniformed, badge-wearing employees handing out bottled water to an exhausted, blanket-huddled crowd evokes nothing as much as relief workers distributing aid to disaster victims, making Z.M. #1 all the more zeitgeisty.

Now that it’s light out and the doors are set to open at eight, the mood has turned social. Dale Larson, the first guy in line, has been waiting in suit and tie since Wednesday, and seems not at all fazed by the questions three or four reporters are volleying at him. “I’ve done at least twenty interviews,” he tells me, “and every time, I just give different answers.” Besides him, nearly everyone is admiring the spectacle, filming each other, filming the Channel 7 film crews, strolling down the block and around the corner and down the block again to film the length of the line, which by rough estimate is about two hundred deep. (Multiply that by the $200 upfront cost of the cheapest model—a price point only achieved under certain circumstances—plus the $75/month for the cheapest voice/data/text plans, plus tax, and you’re looking at a line that’s worth at least a quarter of a million dollars to Apple and AT&T after one year. And we can’t wait to give it away.)  In addition to the cameras, we have folks interviewing each other, Twitter tweeting from their phones, liveblogging on MacBooks, video streaming to the web, a blanket of absolute equiveillance which feels sort of like a marriage of Jeremy Bentham and Andy Warhol. The amateur videographers interfere with the proceedings, and you can tell the Channel 7 guy is sick of taking his cues from where people are pointing their cell phones. High-profile tech blogger Robert Scoble works the line, clapping people on the back (everyone seemed to know him) and introducing them to his son. I give him a head-nod as he approached, and he lifted his hand and grinned the way you do to people you suspect you might know but don’t feel like going through the hassle of finding out. He briefly films me filming him. My roommate is interviewed for Wired Magazine’s blog while also interviewing his interviewer for his (my roommate’s) own blog. Reality tears wide open. We arrive at Zeitgeisty Moment #3: “Now Everyone Films Everything, Including Themselves And Each Other, Even Though Nothing Remotely Interesting Is Happening”. Standing still in a line for eight hours didn’t used to be an activity one urgently notified others about; yet there I was, tweeting, and here I am, writing.

Fast, Cheap, and Good: Pick One. No, Not Those Two

At 8 AM the sidewalk looks like New Delhi. My strategy has been to accept anything that’s offered to me, refusing nothing, and so three of my pockets are stuffed with flyers, promotional iPhone shock protectors, hats, t-shirts, and I’m carrying nearly 400mg of caffeine in my bloodstream. The Starbucks coffee tastes weirdly delicious, which makes me worry. We also worry about what we’ll do with the boxes once the line starts moving—should we just leave them? Will people stop to eat unvetted donuts? Is there something illegal, Homeland Security attention-getting, about leaving boxes of food around? Where did that homeless guy go? The donuts have become a liability. We leave the boxes on the ground next to the overflowing public trash can, and I’m both relieved and disappointed to witness how enthusiastically people, even rich people, will rip through abandoned garbage-adjacent donuts.

The first twenty people are allowed to enter the store to fanfare and applause; I find out that I’m number twenty-one. Robert Scoble gets to cut in, for some reason. With the checkout counters maddeningly obscured from the street, half-a-dozen camera crews and the next throng of line-sitters crane their necks to see up the frosted lucite steps. The police aggressively clear a path on the sidewalk for pedestrians; outside of earshot, the business manager makes a tasteless donut joke.

Forty minutes pass. Ominous grumbling from the press corps. Something’s not right; nobody’s come out of the store. The police have converged around Dale’s tent and are yelling to nobody in particular that the tent has got to go. Dale is summoned from within the store, and he emerges with a pink face. “They’re unable to activate them so far,” he says, “and they’re making me move my tent.” Laughter. He sets about angrily dismantling his tent. “They can’t activate them, the servers are down. I’m getting messages from friends in Houston—they can’t activate them, and they started a time zone or two ago.”

Where is your Jobs now???

We near the front of the line have a dilemma. Many of us expected to still be able to go to work on time—it was Friday morning, after all. Do we cut bait and chalk up the last eight hours to a loss? Or do we wait possibly hours longer, straining our bladders, tasting our own bad breath, reeling through a caffeine crash, risking an earful from the boss, all for a fucking gizmo that we could not only easily buy in a week, but one which, by next year, will be just as obsolete, scratched, and unloved as the phones we’re currently carrying around with us, propping up and vindicating Apple’s strategy of iterative planned obsolescence, deepening the already-pervasive atmosphere of technocratic consumerism that gives us nothing more to believe in than owning a phone that sends email or a computer with a camera in it or a vibrator with a DVD player in it or whatever? Who would stand for this indignity?

We do. For another twenty minutes. And when we have it, it’s like oooooooooooo.