Technology & Opinions: iPhone 6 iReserve HK, ISP, Android, PC & Browsers

Image from reserveiphone

I admit, I am a newbie in reserving and ordering iPhones. I have one-year of experience and practically learned very little about this. I mean, everything from 'Available' to 'Sold out' happens in a matter of 1 to 2 minutes only, what's there to learn? Getting up before 6am every day was the lesson.

Yet, I was very wrong, there are tonnes to learn indeed. Touts are really really professional! It is the first time I have ever heard that someone can usually order 80 iPhones within minutes using fake accounts, and it is also my first time to hear someone actually loaded up their webpage sharp at 8:00am, received their SMS reply from Apple and had their orders confirmed before 8:01am! He even succeeded in his second round!

Sign-in page
Image from ringhk

As for me, my Note 3 on one2Free (CSL) using Android browser was the fastest, loaded up before 8:01am. My PC on ISP Hong Kong Broadband (HKBN) using Google Chrome was not able to load up the sign-in page till 8:05am!!! Hong Kong Broadband sucks at connecting to Apple, having to route to HKIX at CUHK.

tracert reserve.cdn-apple.com takes such a long time to get to the CTI HKBN Gateway
Image from Locky's English Playground

But that's not the end, because all my data was prepared on my PC for copy-and-paste while there is nothing on my Note 3 (even if there were, copying and pasting will take even longer time), my only choice was to type in all information one by one, that slowed the progress down very much. To make the situation even worse, the SMS I sent out at 8:03am, did not receive a reply until 8:05am. A complete waste of 2 minutes!

My SMS send and receive time
Image from Locky's English Playground

Mistakes keep happening as I keyed in the wrong verification code twice and was shown the line,
"You are allowed to login only once per minute. Please wait for a minute before you try again". And I did not wait that one minute and it worked. By the time I finally reached the phone selection page, and having wasted even more time checking store after store for available phones, only iPhone 6 4.7" 16Gb Grey was left, adding another typo at the Hong Kong ID field and just as I reached the selection of timeslot and pressed that final confirm button, a message told me that my slot was no longer available, and nothing was left.

Images from ringhk

I looked at my time, it was 8:10am, and I was dumbfounded. Had it really been 10 minutes? It felt more like 5.

The loading and the SMS should not have taken so long! I blame HKBN and one2Free (CSL) for their slow connections with everything they have got to do with Apple, and I blame them even more because they have some of the best connectivity in Hong Kong any other times!

My complaints do not come out of thin air. This poll said it all!

Poll till 2:27pm, Sep 16 2014
Image from unwire.hk

As I and many other disappointed new iPhone miners look on as the fruit farmers collect their iPhones on the 19th September, the next ray of light will shine at 8am, 20th September. The problem is, professionals will have their bots ready for the hunt. With my worst of the worst combo of HKBN+CSL+hand-typing, the chance of me successfully getting a phone through the claws of iReserve is next to nothing.

Still, I will give it a go, be sleep-deprived and be like a lamb to the slaughter.



Vocabulary:
dumbfounded -- also dumbstruck (adj) so shocked that you cannot speak
out of thin air -- from nothing
look on -- slightly formal (phrasal verb) to watch something happen but not become involved in it
deprived -- (adj) not having the things that are necessary for a pleasant life, such as enough money, food or good living conditions
like a lamb to the slaughter -- (idiom) If a person does something or goes somewhere like a lamb to the slaughter, they do it without knowing that something bad is going to happen and therefore act calmly and without fighting against the situation.


Resources:
HKIX
http://www.hkix.net/

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/dumbfounded
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/out-of-thin-air
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/look-on
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/look-on
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/deprived
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-traditional/like-a-lamb-to-the-slaughter