(Update June 30) I read today’s St. Louis Post Dispatch and found the guy in front of me bought the new iphone, and his picture appeared on the first page! He paid $200 for the No. 14 slot. Neither of us received the 30 tickets handed out to the top 30 people lined up. It’s interesting because the guy and the store manager discussed the scenario such as people who have the tickets may not pass credit check, or may want 8GB only (thus forgo the 4GB version). Now we are talking about persistence. I will put up the photo if I could

(Original 6:15 PM, June 29) So I went to the Olive/Craig AT&T store at 5:50 PM, and found out they gave out 30 tickets already. The guy in front of me got pissed off because he really wanted the phone. The manager apologized for “only got 30 phones”. This morning I heard from radio, St. Louis has 16 AT&T stores, plus 2 Mac stores. Let’s assume each store got 50 iPhones, that’s about 1000 iPhones being allocated in St. Louis. Note St. Louis metropoletian area has about 2.5 million people. Apple expected to sell 1 million tonight, that means St. Louis got about 0.1% on this first shipment. I imagine New York or LA will have more, at least 5000 each city.

Besides the love of gadgets and Apple, I felt some people just want to have a party. Like me. I’m happy with my refurbished iPod nano now.