As someone who worked at Best Buy in the wireless department (a place where multiple cellular carriers are dealt with) I can attest to some of the difficulties that can arise during upgrading. Things go wrong, plans change, features cost more than expected (people get angry). In summary an upgrade can take as little as 5 minutes or as long as an hour. It really depends on a few things. 1) How well trained are the employees in using the system. If it is anything similar to the 3rd party Cingular POS screen I used it can be fairly straightforward as long as nothing goes wrong. 2) How many features/plan changes need to take place. This can extend the time it takes to finish an upgrade.
And that's just upgrades, new activations can take even longer. First of all, you have to run a credit check, enter customer information, select plan, select features, make sure IMEI and SIM card information is entered correctly. In a perfect world this can be done very quickly, but again, credit checks can sometime not go through over the computer in which case you have to call for verification from AT&T, and things like that add minutes very quickly.
I wonder whether or not Apple will be using a specially set up version of activating phones made especially for iPhone or if it is the same as AT&T stores.
Here's what I wish would happen for the Apple store situation. You buy iPhone from Apple, you then activate through a website or through iTunes. Really it's not that difficult to select plans and features. They already do it over the phone and through the Cingular/AT&T website. The only thing with that is how can they guarantee that you sign up for a 2year plan. I'm sure they could figure out someway of making this happen. This would make buying the phone in store a quick process. Being that most Apple stores close at 9 or 10pm activating all the iPhones in the 3-4 hours may be difficult, depending of course on how many people are trying to buy.
