I spent over 5 years setting up new iPhones in Apple stores. Here’s what launch day is like for employees.

Some Apple Store employees work all night to prep for iPhone launch days.

I started at Apple as a bottom-rung salesperson in 2016, and after a couple of years, I worked my way up to become a leader on the Genius Bar.

In my nearly six years with the company, I worked in almost all of the Apple Store locations in the Dallas-Forth Worth area.

Any time there was a new launch, I would always volunteer for the overnight shifts and stay through the day. Every one pretty much came down to the last minute.

Up until 2019 — when they implemented the reservation system —there was only ever hype when it was a new iPhone launch. There were never any people lined up for new watches or new Macs — it was only ever the new iPhones.

Launch day preparations began a week ahead.

During the week leading up to the launch, we would get a pallet of devices that our supervisors kept under lock and key until the night before the launch.

The night would start at 10 p.m. We’d gather around, and leadership would come take everybody’s cellphones, Apple Watches, or computers and put them in a lockbox.

From that point, we weren’t allowed to leave the store or use our phones without a manager’s supervision. We weren’t held hostage or anything, but it was highly, highly secretive even though everybody knew what was coming out.

So, we would stay up all night taking up all the old devices in the store and updating the new ones.

You could not take pictures or record. You could not talk about anything or test the device. They wanted to keep launch day special, with first reactions being from actual customers instead of Apple employees. Totally understandable.

It was a lot more than swapping in the new devices and sending the old ones to recycling — or whatever else Apple decided to do with the older ones.

When new chargers or accessories are involved, it could be complicated to reroute wires underneath the uniform tables in Apple stores. Sometimes it was dozens of devices we had to update across the store, and some required us to disarm the store’s security alarm before we could disconnect them.

We’d go until 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. the next day. It was definitely a lot of work, but always super fun.

Pretty much everyone was a salesperson on launch day.

If leadership allowed, we could stay for the first couple of hours to work the opening if we weren’t too tired. Usually, everyone went home after that, but I was one of the few Geniuses who worked on technical reservations for launch days.

For the rest of the technical team, it was the one day a year when they were told, “You are no longer on the technical side. You are now a salesperson.”

The store was usually fully packed and focused on sales rather than device issues. We’d only allow technical reservations ahead of time and no walk-ins unless the person’s phone was completely dead and unusable.

My hours were long, but it was only ever if I wanted to stay. Some leaders would say, “No, bro. You’ve been here all night. Go home.”

No matter where you are, Apple abides by California rules, which means mandatory breaks every three hours. They were very mindful of the hours that we worked, and we were never, ever, ever required to work over.

Although in-person excitement on launch days died down by the time I left Apple in 2022, there were always two distinct crowds.

There were people who had already made up their minds before even seeing the phone that they were going to buy it no matter what. It doesn’t matter if Apple took features away — they wanted whatever the company would give them.

And then there were those who came in after launch day by accident — they were more interested in testing out the phones to see what they were all about.

In terms of the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence, the AI hype is real across the whole industry. I didn’t expect Apple to lean this heavily into AI. Usually, they take a couple of years when new software comes out to make sure they do it the right way.

But Apple always does great stuff with software, so this AI push is right up their alley.