Apple's first batch of iPhone 5 preorders sold out in an hour If you were hoping to have your brand-new iPhone 5 in your sweaty hands on its announced September 21 launch date, you may be out of luck. Apple has run out of its initial stock for preorders of its new smartphone, and carriers' stocks are dwindling rapidly. Apple's online store was reportedly still listing the September 21 …
"But EVERY TIME they release and iphone it happens and you would have thought they would have learnt by now how many they need to produce."
Do you understand supply chains? It's not in Apple's interest to make enough to satisfy day-one demand, they'd have to have started manufacturing even earlier than they did, and have them sitting in an even bigger warehouse. Rule one of retail, never carry too much stock. Especially when they know 99% of their customers will probably wait.
But EVERY TIME they release and iphone it happens and you would have thought they would have learnt by now how many they need to produce.
By your logic, they should delay the launch until they have produced enough inventory to cover all potential sales of the phone, sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock whilst it depreciates in value and consumers buy competitors phones.
They announce as soon as they have the supply chain in place to produce a steady stream of phones. Anything else would be stupid.
Even I am not a Apple-believer, I tend to believe that this time it is more to demand than supply issue. I do appreciate their design cue, but engineer inside me despises the products.
In engineering vise iPhones have been just piece of crap, except on UI design and in mechanical terms. In many aspects those are years behind the competition. And even iOS UI has been falling behind the competition in recent years.
And I have never ever liked locked down iOS ecosystem, of which only purpose is to maximize AAPL profits. Same kind of greediness can be seen from the fact, that AAPL tries to sell Ligthning-to-USB connector to its European customers for 30€, when that should be included to sales pack with no extra cost. This kind of arrogance is personally the biggest retracting factor of all. But there seems to be people, who do not have this perception.
I share your view completely Mika from 2nd paragraph onwards, but i still dont think it's their supply issue that make it so hard to get an apple phone but the apple management, they just want to create the kind of shortage hype impression that you will look stupid if you dont have an IP5. afterall, it's not their first time to release a phone. Sadly, majority of the people dont share the view and didn't realise how much they have been ripped off by apple.
I assume you mean by "lightening to USB" you mean the lightening to micro USB adaptor? It's 18€ not 30€... But obviously it doesn't look as bad if you use actual figures rather than made up ones.
You're complaining because Apple, a business, created their (admittedly closed) ecosystem to maximise profits?!? Has anyone informed the papers of this breaking news? Corporations trying to earn money?!
"Or maybe the demand was too high and despite good planning they were sold out...... Of course, this doesn't work too well with the agenda of your comment."
"Good planning" isn't fully compatible with "demand was too high". If they don't have enough to meet demand, then they didn't produce enough. The only question is whether the forecast was wrong by error or by design. Selling out is good publicity. Almost any company would try that trick and Apple is possibly the world's greatest marketing company so it's hardly unlikely that they would have deliberately held back. It's not even a particularly serious accusation. It's quite possible that they have a whole bunch of containers of these things waiting in China that they decided to place on this month's ship rather than last months just so they could get the "SOLD OUT!" headline. Companies have done far, far worse things than that in the pursuit of profit.
The only real negative for them of the 'sold out' ploy, is if either the hype on the iPhone5 is very shortlived (which it probably will be) or if something else steals their thunder (which with a variety of WP8 phones imminently about to be launched is quite possible). In this latter case, the Marketing 101 could actually backfire for once.
When you are talking this sort of scale and to avoid the risk of too many details leaking - they are going to run out - whether it is 1 hour, 2 hours or 4 hours - it's going to happen very soon.
I'm sure they also like the headlines of 'sold out' showing it's popular but unavailability will also cost them sales so it's a balance.
Yes, the last time they did this with the iPhone 4S they really fooled people into thinking it was much more popular than it was. They only sold 37 million in Q4 and another 35 million in Q1. What a failure!
If they sell 50 million this Q4, as analysts expect, will you still say they're "pretending the iPhone is a lot more popular than reality dictates"? Because what, these launch shortages could only be real for a product that would sell 100 million next quarter?
wtf... price games again:(
they're practically selling 64Gb of flash memory for +200 usd?
a heavy duty usb flash drive is half of that and it also includes a sturdy rubber enclosure that you can drive a truck over or dump into water 50m deep and it will protect it. Try that with their phone.
You should see how fast the Playbooks sold here in Canada today... Walmart has a sale: PB 16 GB for $99, 32 GB for $118. The stores are opening at 7:00 AM. I make a huge effort to get out of bed by 7:00 AM, and I am in front of the store at 7:15 AM (I live really close). They were sold out, it seems some people queued up and got the 50 or so they had in stock. All sold within 5 minutes. No headlines in the news though.
@ toadwarrior: the point Raz is making, is that all those techsites and presscoverage on iPhones is ridiculous when all other technews get ignoredby them. It only adds to the confusion.
He 's right! It is ridiculous that Apple gets all the airplay while other (innovative) technology gets silenced to death. Hypocrites.
And yes, El Reg is participating in this too. They should just STOP posting anything iPhone related instead of even these bullshit articles on "how iPhones undermine western civilization" etc...
Slaves - hardly - I'm not saying I'd want to work for their wages but then again they don't have my mortgage to pay either.
Do you stop to think what these people would be doing is they were not assembling iPhones? Working even harder in the fields for even less money.
Perhaps Apple should automate the lot and then what... will they be better off or worse off. Ever wonder why people travel hundreds of miles to queue for jobs at these factories - fact is it's better than the other option available to them.
Lastly - it's not as if it's just Apple that uses Chinese workers - I read an article the other day that said Samsung used child labour but it was 'legal' as they were not being paid.
"El Reg advises anyone sad enough to chance it to dress warmly, wear sensible shoes, and pack a lunch. In fact, breakfast might be a good idea, too. ®"
.............of which company we are talking about.
Do you mean 'friendly' as in 'hello there ickle babby want to play with nanna?' or as in 'user-friendly, e.g. permits tweaking of almost all settings and features to suit the user'? Because I think they're quite different. As for slick, a Disney cartoon is slick too, but I wouldn't want to look at one every day.
"User friendly" means "easy to use".
Being able to "tweak almost all settings and features to suit the user" is known in the trade as customisability, and iOS offers plenty of such features too.
As for the Samsung Galaxy SIII, I've played with one too. Nasty screen, irritating GUI (sorry, Google, but you still don't get it, do you? It's consistency the people want, not battery-draining widgets and overblown transitions).
And, of course, it's a Samsung, so it's a blatant rip-off of Apple's design language as well. Why buy a bad photocopy of a Van Gogh, when I can have the original for about the same price?
As for the childish "walled garden" and "fanboi" bollocks: I'd rather live in a gated community than the Big Brother house.
"User friendly" and "user customizable" are actually completely different.
I would guess that you buy many products in your life that are well-designed and user friendly while giving you very few options to customize how they appear or how you operate them. Kitchen appliances... any device that's operated by remote control... you can't change what the pedals/buttons do in your car... etc.
I understand there are people in the world who feel the need to customize everything they own... customize their car by adding spoilers, replacing the badging, etc... customize their watches by changing the dials and straps... but I would say that most people are happy to buy and use products that are fairly well designed out of the box with no need for much customization.
@AC 00:28, "most people are happy to buy and use products that are fairly well designed out of the box with no need for much customization."
Sure, but iOS not allowing me to do away with swipe-to-access aggravates my RSI, and having its unintelligible symbols stand in for menu options at every turn, is deeply irritating and confusing, means my mother cannot work her iPhone, and feels more a design flaw than anything else - it's something Android remedies.
Ultimately it's the user who legitimately decides what is a good design or not; and price is part of utility. I am not happy with the contention a gold-plated gizmo is objectively good design: as would you not be were it insisted you drive only a tractor. Suitability is good design and it is relative. It doesn't suit me to pay £1000 for a toy where -£10 can buy the same incl airtime (see my previous posts).
Maybe I got 'lucky'... I ordered my white iPhone 5 32GB late on Friday afternoon. At the time the 'shipping date' was 2-3 weeks, then 2, then 'October' on my order'. I got an email this afternoon to say the phone will be arriving on the 21st.
Perhaps they can't count?
I don't understand. What is wrong with simply buying the phone you want? The iPhone seems like the smallest, lightest, probably fastest or as fast smartphone out there. I order one and they send it to me. it only costs an hours pay anyway. What you do not seem to realise is that there are many, many people who can buy all these phones and then choose which one they want to use each day. Like watches. The ones that we don't want go to the poorer cousins.
An hour's pay? Plebian! I make that much in just a few minutes - and what kind of cheap arse buys a phone? If I want to call someone, I just tell Reginald my butler to make the call - and If I don't feel like talking to him I just throw caviar at him until he does what I'm thinking.
And who needs a watch? It's *much* easier to just get Jeeves my other butler to throw money at a passing stranger until they tell me the time.
What you do not seem to realise is that there are many, many people who can buy all these butlers and then choose which one they want to use each day.
Posted from my butler, Belvedere
I visited AT/T's website, clicked pre-order, now I'm waiting patiently for the phone to be delivered in a week or two. Why do people still find it necessary to camp outside the stores? On slim chance they'll get one in their hands a few days earlier, they'll have to deal with the server crashes, network outages, and have no phone coverage for hours or days while millions of people grab the latest Apple Gizmo. It's just waaaay too much drama.
To all of you, thank-you so much for beta-testing the phones and working out the ios bugs before mine arrives.
As stated, you just don't get it. The people at the front of the queue get lots and lots of publicity for a cause or product or app they are releasing. The people a bit further back still get publicity for their products, and the rest are there for the Chinese scalpers. You can get a hundred quid mark up on the phone for queueing, get 2 and that's a tidy £200 for wasting your time. It's the people at the very back that are the ones waiting for the phones.
To be fair I feel my time is worth more than that but I've queued for publicity and got my app mentioned in the Evening Standard and on Sky News. I couldn't buy that kind of press so waiting a few hours for it is worth while.
Samsung Galaxy S3 hit 9 million pre-orders - and that's just one of many Samsung models, one of thousands of Android devices.
But as noted above, "selling out" figures tell us nothing. I noticed that Samsung started doing this trick too with the S3 - and who can blame them, given people are taken in by the spin. But I'd hope people were more intelligent here.
It's especially meaningless for a platform that's known for obsessive fanatics who have to buy it the moment it comes out (but I guess, so would I if I'd already waited two and a half years since the last non-trival phone improvement - since the 4S was a minor change - with other platforms/companies, you don't have to wait ages then rush out to get a new phone, as there are upgrades and improvements all year round). (I've got to laugh - on another article, people were criticising Apple users for being fanatical like this, and someone suggested it was unfair to portray Apple users like that, as they don't rush out and get the latest Apple feature phone the moment it comes out - yet here we have an article praising Apple for just that! Which is it?)
Let's wait for actual sales figures - and with Android at almost 70% and rising, Iphone at 16% and falling, it won't look pretty. Yes, I'm sure Apple will get a boost in Q4 due to their new release, but then it will go back down again. Unlike the sales of Android, or market leaders Samsung and Nokia, where sales remain high all year round.
What's more, they manage this without the endless hype and free advertising that the media and many other companies unfairly give to the smaller Iphone platfom. Why do they do it? Can't Apple afford their own advertising?
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