The 5S will be my eighth iPhone and I can’t wait. I got up at 2:55 AM last Friday to place my order online. When I got to the very last step, a message appeared saying “Your carrier has a policy that shipments of the iPhone can only be made to your billing address of record”.  My billing address of record is in Florida and I am presently in Connecticut.  By mid-morning, I had the matter fixed with AT&T and placed the order. During those few short hours, the shipment estimate went from 1 day to 10 days. Thanks, AT&T. I sold my current iPhone 5 to Gazelle for $367.50 and have until October 15 to ship it to them.  I sold the iPhone to Gazelle in August, anticipating the new announcements. Gazelle is very clever about setting prices.  They follow a sophisticated model of how prices decay in the market.  I suspect the iPhone 5 prices will drop quickly, because unlike the financial analyst ho-hum attitude over the announcements, I believe they were quite significant as I wrote in the initial post.
Speaking of significant, Apple does some amazing things. In two days they upgraded nearly a quarter of a billion iPhones to iOS 7. Let’s put that in context. iOS7 is an operating system.  The operating system is a computer program that consists of approximately a billion characters of information that control how the iPhone works — how the icons appear, gestures allow controlling the display, SIRI interprets your voice, and thousands of detailed things that make the iPhone an iPhone.  Upgrading from iOS 6 to iOS 7 is done by tapping on the iPhone screen. Minutes later the iPhone re-boots itself and is up and running with the new operating system.  I remember years ago what it was like to upgrade the operating system at an IBM banking customer in Philadelphia.  I don’t recall the size of the operating system — surely a mere fraction of the size of iOS 7 — but I do remember that there was a large team of bank IT staff plus a dozen or so IBMers that worked together to make the upgrade. It took an entire weekend and everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the bank was back up and running. Attention all financial analysts — when Apple quietly upgraded 200+ million supercomputers with a new operating system in a couple of days, that is significant.