Enthusiastic Apple fans, you say. Blithering idiots, I say:
If you’d told me this story I wouldn’t have believed it. But on Thursday night, walking from a screening of “Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain” to dinner at Todd English’s Food Hall in the Plaza Hotel, we were gobsmacked. More than a thousand people are lined up, with sleeping bags, for the 8am release of the new iPhone 6. The line goes from Madison Avenue and 59th St. to Fifth Avenue in front of the tony Cipriani restaurant, then jumps onto the plaza in front of FAO Schwarz, next to Apple.
What kind of people camp overnight just to get a new smartphone? They can't bear to keep using the old one for a few days or even a couple of weeks? I can't decide: On the evolutionary scale, are these people slightly above or slightly below the Black Friday idiots camping in front of Best Buy?