iPhone 4S advance preorders end amid half-million sales, now 1-2 weeks
Apple has suspended advance preorders of the iPhone 4S less than twenty-four hours after they begun, informing customers who place online orders that it’ll now be a post-order of sorts, with the device not shipping for one to two weeks, placing its arrival later than the October 14th retail launch date. Those who didn’t sneak their order in on time will now need to brave retail crowds if they want an iPhone 4S in their hands on the 14th. Why did Apple pull the plug so quickly? AT&T reports that it received more than two hundred thousand 4S preorders from its existing and new customers, a far greater number than the iPhone 4 notched last year.
That kind of high volume suggests that Apple quickly blew through the iPhone 4S inventory it allotted for advance online orders and now wants to hang onto the remaining inventory for its upcoming retail launch. Based on overall carrier size, Verizon can be assumed to have notched roughly the same number of preorders, while smaller Sprint may have scored half that much, adding up to a cool half million estimated iPhone 4 preorders in half a day in the United States alone. So much for the notion of the iPhone 4S being a flop…
source: beatweek.com
