The record is 240 hours.

Rob Shoesmith sat outside the Apple Store in Covent Garden, London, for ten days to be first through the door for an iPhone 4S. Not ten hours. Ten days, in England, in October, on a pavement.

He is not an outlier so much as an early leader in a discipline with real depth. Mazen Kourouche, a Sydney reviewer, turned up ten days early for the iPhone X. Lindsay Handmer, writing for Gizmodo, camped two weeks in Sydney ahead of the iPhone 6s. And at Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship, the 5s and 5c launch produced the store’s longest line on record: 1,417 people counted at 8am.

The phone is the same on Tuesday

Here’s the thing every outsider says, and they’re right: the device that comes out of the box at 8:01am on launch Friday is molecule-for-molecule identical to the one you can order on a Tuesday from your sofa, often for the same money, delivered.

So the ten days buy nothing. No better phone, no discount, no feature.

Which is how you know the phone was never the stat.

What’s being optimised here is position — a number that exists only relative to other people, can only be won once per cycle, and evaporates the instant the doors open. First. That’s it. That’s the whole scoreboard, and it is one of the purest maxxing structures in existence precisely because it has no utility contaminating it. You cannot pretend you did it for the specs.

The infrastructure of being first

Like every serious branch, the practice has developed technique. Camping chairs, sleeping bags, tag-team rotations so the spot is never vacated, pre-negotiated bathroom arrangements with nearby businesses, battery banks, weather planning. Professional line-sitters exist and charge by the day. Queue positions themselves get bought and sold — the stat is liquid.

That is the same escalation ladder you find in sneaker deadstock and card grading: a hobby that becomes a logistics problem the moment enough people take it seriously, at which point the logistics become the hobby.

And note who these people are. Shoesmith, Kourouche and Handmer aren’t anonymous. Being first is only worth something if it’s witnessed — so the queue is documented, filmed, posted. The 1,417 people on Fifth Avenue were counted, which means someone was counting. A stat nobody records isn’t a stat.

Nobody is confused about this

The best thing about iPhonemaxxing is how clear-eyed its practitioners are. Ask a ten-day queuer why and you will not get a defence of the hardware. You’ll get something closer to: it’s a laugh, the people in the line are good company, and somebody has to be first.

They’ve correctly identified that the thing they want — a small, unrepeatable, entirely social distinction — is not for sale and cannot be shipped. The only way to get it is to go and sit on the pavement in October and be more committed than everybody else.

Ten days for a phone that arrives Tuesday anyway. The phone was the excuse. The ten days were the point.