iPhone lines cost years of manpower...

iPhone Lines Cost U.S. 12 Man Years

Picture_7 That's the back-of-the envelope calculation of Jeremy Toeman at Live Digitally, who has been tracking reports from bloggers covering the lines Apple (AAPL) stores around the country. His count is conservative for several reasons: he undercounts the number of Apple stores and doesn't include AT&T stores at all. Still, it's an impressive waste of time. His calculations:

the 11 cities I tracked represented 8790 person-hours of line-waiting. With 140 Apple stores nationwide (not even counting AT&T stores, by the way), this represents 7.8% of all stores. A tiny bit of extrapolation later and we have 111872 person-hours spent waiting in line . The totals:

111872 person-hours.

4661 person-days.

12.77 person-years.

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