First in the queue was Jewels Lewis, who had begun queuing early on Thursday morning. A few minutes before 5pm, he disappeared into the Apple Store and emerged 15 minutes later clutching his new iPad 2.

A little further back in the queue, some had been waiting for a full day - not quite as long as Lewis, but a fair amount of time in anyone's book.

"The queue really started to swell just after 4am when the first trains started coming in," Harry Barrington-Mountford told Macworld. Harry's girlfriend, Fenella Barnes, said that she had managed to get about an hour of sleep and praised the Apple Store staff for bringing food and refreshments. They were around 25 people from the front.