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.