Shane Cole
Just after midnight local time, Apple opened sales of their new flagship iPhone 5s and 5c to customers in in the Far East and Down Under, and orders were immediately met with delays of a week or more, pushing deliveries into the next month.
Apple's new flagship iPhone 5s and lower-cost iPhone 5c are now available for purchase from the company's online store in Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. iPhone 5c, which has been available for preorder since Sept. 13, shows shipping lead times of 1 to 3 business days in all three countries.
iPhone 5s, which is said to face severe supply constraints, is shown with lead times of 7 to 10 business days in Australia. Hong Kong and Singapore list shipping dates for the handset simply as "October."
It's believed that limited supplies may be due to low yields of the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor, prompting Apple to not offer preorders of its latest flagship handset.
Although Apple has not released preorder numbers for the iPhone 5c — much to investors' chagrin — a spokeswoman for Australian carrier Vodafone, one of Apple's launch partners, told the Sydney Morning Herald that preorders were "going well as expected." Analysts believe that Apple could sell as many as 8 million of the new handsets over the coming weekend.
Customers in the new iPhones' other launch countries — Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Puerto Rico, the U.S. and the U.K. — can purchase the devices at an Apple retail store starting at 8:00 am local time on Friday, and the phones are also available from Apple's carrier partners.
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Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
23 Comments
Let's hope this is not iMac redux.
I love how they're supposed to sell 8 million of these and yet no one can get their hands on one unless they're outside an Apple store within the first hour ha.
I am sorry this article is highly misleading.
Hong Kong has been accepting preorders for a few days now because like China, they need to combat the scalpers and resellers. They have a balloting system in place.
Singapore has been accepting preorders with the local telcos since yesterday and collection will start in a few hours. Traditionally, the official Apple store does not get a whole lot of stock until about a month later.
If the last iPhone launch is anything to go by, the online Apple store sold out pretty much in seconds.
"...It's believed that limited supplies may be due to low yields of the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor, prompting Apple to not offer preorders of its latest flagship handset...."
Which anal-yst believes that? How much will they earn on AAPL this time?
iPhone will sell like hell, and WS criminals and lying and cheating Samscum and Booble can eat themselves alive...
well, until the US load kicks in (The phone may be the same underneath, but unit labelling/etching, packaging, power plug), and the pre-planning levels for each combination really drive the supply levels for each country), I'm not really concerned. It may be that 90% of the pre-release production may be sitting in FedEx warehouses in Memphis… (or not ;-( )
After Monday, then I'll worry or not. (I'm looking at at Oct 1st-ish purchase).
The fact it is the same phone underneath, the 's' should be much more flexible in terms of addressing particular supply shortages later in the next month.