Apple Manipulates The Queue For iPhones In Australia
Fred Schebesta is the director of Mobile Phone Finder — the company that had put 5 of their own people at the very front of the line three days earlier — and he tells us his account. Were they cheated out of the world’s first iPhone?
Fred has told me that the Finder guys were “aggressively held back” once they entered the store by who they claim to be Apple PR staff. James and Tamsyn passed them by and before they knew it, the two people who were far from first in the queue walked out with the world’s first iPhone 5.
Obviously, Apple didn’t want the Australian press publishing pictures of the Mobile Phone Finder people as the “first people to get an iPhone 5”.
Apple has no interest in giving random companies free press.
Can Mobile Phone Finder complain? Of course not. Apple can choose to sell or not sell the phone to whoever they want to. It’s not a human right to buy an Apple product, nor is it a right for companies to be able to piggyback on Apple’s brand for free PR.