Queing for a phone. Don’t judge.

I’m writing to you from a Tim Horton’s in Birmingham city centre where I have just hesitated over buying a medium or a large coffee because there was 75p in the difference. But the reason I’m here at 06:30 on a Friday is that I’ve just queued outside the Apple Store for the new iPhone Duo which costs so much that I cannot, just cannot bring myself to type the figure. What I’d rather do is tell you that as silly as I felt heading for the store, it was fun. Standing in the rain with about 30 people, where instead of saying “hello”, everybody would greet you with variations on “why are we doing this?” It was terribly collegiate and friendly and just actually a good time. Part of it was that there was even a little tension to spice things up. For once claims of it being hard to get one of these phones are not hype. The foldable iPhone Duo is extraordinarily hard to manufacture, to the extent that the yield of sellable devices was reportedly about 60% of all made just a little while ago.…