If you are impatient and want the iphone 5 in your hand the very next day, I suggest going to the apple site and place an order for in store pickup. Originally I placed my order with verizon and had a 3-4 week wait. Then I decided to cancel the verizon order and I got myself one the very next day and didn't have to wait for long delivery dates. Here is how I did it:
1) Go to http://www.apple.com/retail/iphone/
2) Notice the message "iPhone 5 is available in limited quantities. Buy it at your favorite Apple Retail Store or choose in-store pickup when you buy online between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m."
3) I have noticed that by the time you fill out the form information at 10pm, the iphone 5's are out of stock at your local store in probably 5 minutes. So they sell out really fast. So what I did to bypass the form was to login with my appleid and pre-fill the form around 9:30pm and SAVE it to the cart.
4) At this point, I needed to know exactly what store I wanted to pick it up from. I chose 3 stores around my area in order of preference in case if one didn't have it in stock I could move on to the next without wasting any time thinking about it at the time of checkout. When 9:55pm rolls around, I logged into my saved cart and checked out picking the store I wanted.
5) Then entered my payment information and picked it up the next day.
The only disadvantage to this approach was you may not get your preferred store, but this didn't bother me too much as I didn't want to wait 4 weeks for my phone. I hope this helps some people. If there are questions, I will try to answer.. Good luck to those still waiting!!
Do you know how this is affected by your upgrade date? I am eligible tomorrow so will it be able to tell that I cannot upgrade by then?
Go to the link I provided and click on "Check upgrade eligibility"
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