I’ve been an iPhone user ever since the iPhone 4 made its way to Verizon back in early 2011, preordering each phone that I’ve used since then. Each time a new device was preordered, I was able to get it on launch day without a problem.

Last October, we switched from Verizon to Sprint, partially due to their iPhone Forever program, which allows users to upgrade to the new iPhone every year when it’s released. Since we switched about a month after the iPhone 6S launch, it wasn’t as difficult to get the models that we wanted.

Fast foward to this year. After the iPhone 7 was announced on September 7th, we called the local Sprint store that we’ve dealt with to see what the process would be to upgrade to the new iPhone and were told it would be easiest for us to come into the store Friday morning to preorder, so that’s exactly what we did.

When we went into the store bright and early on September 9th, the systems were down, but we were told that our order would go through the same day, even with those problems and that we would receive a phone call when our phones were in. Without hearing anything from them, we called on launch day and even went into the store the following day to see if there was any update about our phones, since we preordered right away.

Nothing. Just the promise that they’d call us.

A few days later, I called Sprint’s order support number that had been posted in the forums on MacRumors to find out if I could get an order number to be able to track our in store order. Order Support told us that no order had been placed, and after talking to the store, we found out that our original order never went through, so we went back into the store to place a new order, thinking that we would be sent to the end of the line.

After talking to the store manager, we found out that the issue with our order happened with a few others and a note had been put on our account to hopefully expedite our order so that we would receive it before November, which was the quoted shipping estimate at that time.

Another week has come and gone since that conversation, and only one of our three phones has had any sort of movement, while the iPhone 7 Pluses we ordered are still stuck in limbo somewhere and were to ship by September 30th, except that Sprint changed their estimate just a few hours before that, pushing back early preorders to ship October 4th-18th.

At this point, it’s incredibly unclear as to when we’ll receive our phones, and unfortunately, based on other posts in the MacRumors forum that I’ve been following, it doesn’t seem like Sprint cares. While I haven’t personally contacted them recently, many on the forums have been given canned responses, basically blaming Apple for the lack of phones in our hands.

It’s been a long three weeks since the preorder, and based on the latest updates, it’s looking like it could be a long few weeks until my new toy is delivered.

If you preordered an iPhone 7, what was your experience like?