Not an iPhone 3G to be found in Seattle

I made the mental leap to buy an iPhone over the weekend.  My current Motorola flip phone is starting to get worn out and the new phone has a couple nice features such as a faster internet connection than the prior iPhone and GPS capabilities.  My contract with Verizon is up and, since they haven’t gone out of their way to do anything nice for me lately, I have no qualms about switching to another carrier.  All that adds up to my willingness to shell out $200 and another $20/month for the fancy iPhone 3G.

My excitement and lack of self control hit a snag though…I can’t find one in Seattle.  For the mad rush AT&T experienced with the first iPhone and the amount of lead time they had on the 3G, I thought they would have built something to better handle the rush like…I don’t know…enough iPhones!  Another frustrating thing about the whole launch is that there appears to be no sort of ‘availability’ tool on AT&T’s website.  With today’s high-tech supply chain and point of sale systems, I’d think real-time inventory monitoring on the website would be possible and pretty easy.  I could log in, type in my zip code and it would tell me the closest store with 3G iPhones in stock.  Alas, there is no fancy online tool for this.  If you call an individual store, they appear to have no idea if other stores in the area have any or not either.

I’m a techie, I get frustrated by this sort of thing.  Supply seems like it shouldn’t be a problem here.  Apple knows there is a ton of demand, they don’t get any more money for each phone by having such limited supply. Any number, within reason, that they ship to the store in the first week would end up getting sold quickly over the next few weeks even if they overestimated demand.

The only excuse I can think of is if they limit demand so that they can make hardware revisions if they find a problem early on after widespread adoption, but Apple just doesn’t seem like that kind of company.

Anyway, I really have no point other than to say I am confused with the lack of supply out there and an more confused by the lack of any decent tools on AT&T’s behalf to make inventory levels for all nearby stores available either to the public or to the store employees themselves.  I guess the bottom line is that…I just want my iPhone and I’m bitter about it.