After Nearly 100 Hours in Line, San Francisco’s First iPhone 5 (opens in new tab)

And, a few hours later, I queued up at the same Apple store and walked out of the store 20 minutes later with my iPhone 5. I suppose you can never know in advance, but this time they still had hundreds in stock at noon.

Ok, that is some epic PR right there. Nice job. I really like a creative campaign like that.

I was sort of wondering why one of the live flight tracking services didn't jump on the Shuttle fly by in the Bay Area today to provide live tracking of its location.

Saw the line outside the Apple store here in Pasadena this morning and thought "Task Rabbit".

Now the REAL question, how much did this guy make for his 90 hours of standing in line???

I genuinely don't get it. Can someone please explain why the hell anyone would queue up like this?

Food, water, medicine, supplies - yes.

Shiny telephone - no.

Doesn't this PR work underline the darker side of TaskRabbit, or at least clearly demonstrate that TakRabbit is leveraging income disparity to profit? That is, some people either want or need money enough that they are willing pull a 90 hour shift so someone else with spare money can get an expensive phone arbitrarily early.

This is really well done promotion and PR! You can see that TaskRabbit PR even hired TaskRabbits to create further good visuals: "TaskRabbits gave pastries to San Francisco’s iPhone 5 fans." This sort of focus on visuals is the mark of a true professional.

And also, all photos were posted online and are available for reporters to use for future stories. (The only thing that could make this better is if higher-rez versions were available online, for reporters to download and use in future stories.) Great job, guys!!

In an alternate universe, I spent five minutes pre-ordering my iPhone and had it by 9:30 a.m. I feel like such a chump. I should have hired a TaskRabbit to do that for me.

This was a great PR stunt by task rabbit!