I was some of the lucky people that were able to pick up Apple’s new iPhone X on launch day without waiting 4-6 weeks because I was fortunate to be eligible under the Apple iPhone Upgrade Program. This allowed me to reserve a pre-order spot for the specs of my choosing ahead of the Friday morning pre-order madness at 3:00am EST.

All I had to do was wake up, open the Apple Store app on my phone and voila – my phone was ready to order.

Fast forward one week…

Amy and I lined up at the Apple Store in Reston (the pre-order line had a separate and shorter line compared to the people that didn’t pre-order) and as with the iPhone 7 launch, it was very organized.

When it was my turn, an Apple representative walked out and escorted me inside the store and the whole buying experience felt like it was catered specifically for me.

The Apple representative walk me through the whole purchase process and “paperwork”, which was basically showing them my ID and signing with my finger on their iPhone to confirm the pick up. While this was going one, another representative walked up and handed my sales representative my exact iPhone.

This was only the first process of the purchase.

The next step was with another Apple representative, whose job was to help me transfer my old iPhone 7 profile over to the new iPhone X.

I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with iOS 11’s new ease of profile transfer.

Basically, you make sure that your old iPhone is close to the new iPhone that you’re setting up and both phones will recognize each other and begin the transfer. All you have to do is confirm which iPhone X you want to “link” to by scanning the floating dot matrix code with your old iPhone (seen above) and that is it…painless.

The only hiccup during this otherwise smooth process was that I had to immediately update to iOS 11.1 and then load the backups from my iCloud. The whole restore process took about twenty minutes. Ten minutes for the original transaction. Thirty minutes total.

Overall, I have to hand it to Apple for another successful (meaning no crazy lines like the iPhone 5 launch) and reinforce my belief that nobody does it better than Apple when it comes to customer service and overall smooth experience.

Not sure if I’ll do a review on the iPhone X but so far, I’m liking it.

Photos taken with the Leica Q.