$120,000,000 lost productivity from iphone 4g lines (frutel.com)

A real big stretch. Overnight hours normally spent sleeping shouldn't be factored in. And how many people took a vacation day for this?

Much more is lost due to Hacker News. :-)

iPhone 4. There is no such thing as iPhone 4G.

Well, the problem with this theory is that a fairly significant portion of the line crowd had their ipads/iphones and were working away. I, personally, cleared out a significant portion of my Jira queue, and triaged (and responded) to pretty much the entire day's email while I was in Line in Palo Alto. It was actually a very productive 90 minutes for me.

Presuming the time would have been spent elsewhere productively?

They'll make it up with multi-tasking.

Hmmm, I would imagine the average hourly wage of 6000 people would be much lower than $50/hour....

Was looking at the line outside Oakfield Mall yesterday and asked an advisor if anyone had done this calc. Thanks.

Hmm, so as humans we should be productive every day, all day? Didn't realize if I took part of my day to wait for something I was excited about meant I was doing something wrong!

I don't have the link, but apparently that's nothing compared to the time lost when google made their logo an interactive pacman game