According to BGR, Apple will be offering a pre-registration process for iPhone purchases but will not bring back the old “buy it, take it home, crack it/activate it” model used by so many of us during the first iPhone craze.
The new process will allow you to sign up for a phone and potentially pay for it and then head to the Apple – or AT&T store, although this is not confirmed – to activate it. Not helpful to hackers but it could shave precious minutes off of your daily iPhone buying trips. Why oh why Apple didn’t you implement this earlier? Imagine being able to pre-order and waddle down to the Apple store to pick up the phone on the first day. It would have been heaven. Instead, you got this.