iPhone 15 Pro Max delivery estimates hit October minutes into preorders
Within minutes of Apple taking preorders for the iPhone 15 range, the iPhone 15 Pro Max was selling out and delivery dates are being pushed back into November.
Apple's preorders started late -- two minutes late or so in the US and up to around six minutes internationally -- but for a very brief time all iPhones were listed as delivering on September 22. That's the date Apple announced they would, but it's not the date that stayed true for very long.
After moments, the iPhone 15 Pro Max delivery date slipped to saying "7-10 days," which could still mean September 22 but almost certainly doesn't.
Then just before preorders had been open for half an hour, the iPhone 15 Pro Max jumped to being available in "2-3 weeks." At 3:30 PM, the same models had delivery estimates into early November.
At time of original publication, both the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus continue to be available for delivery next Friday. The iPhone 15 Pro briefly and oddly changed to saying "5-7 days," but is now showing "7-10 days."
These are the dates for the base configuration of each iPhone 15 model, and the first color option listed by Apple. However, all colors and all configurations of the iPhone 15 Pro Max -- including the 1TB version -- are now backordered.
Apple never releases sales figures, nor production ones, so it's not possible to truly know whether the iPhone 15 Pro Max is selling out faster than expected.
However, it is possible to know that if users still want to get one before October, they need to try going to an Apple retail store on Friday, September 22, 2023.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
” Both my wife and I here in NYC, along with our daughter in Dallas Texas had problems ordering this morning.
despite being early and waiting for the store to open (late), the store app we were all using didn’t seem to want to process our orders. First there were problems in getting the store. Then finally, almost fifteen minutes later, there were errors telling us to try again later. Again finally, it began. At the very end when I was ready to double tap the button for Apple Pay to go through, I was told my session had expired and I had to reorder my phone from the beginning. My wife went through the same thing and then was told that Apple Pay wasn’t installed, so she had to pay directly with AmEx.
my daughter had the same problems I had, but was also finally able to get one. She got lucky and is getting hers next week. But because of the problems and likely because of the popularity of the model and configuration, mine won’t be arriving until between Oct 6 and 22nd. My wife’s between the 8th and 24th.
usually the store opens a couple of minutes late, but we’ve never had problems like this before. I would have believed the problems were ours but for my daughter, with a different account halfway across the country, also having the same problems.
anyone else here have problems?”
In parallel i used the App Store on my iPad and connected through cellular. Same message. I let it all sit while i did some other things. First to come up to the site was the iPad Apple Store app. But every time i tried my preset order, it just skipped back to the main page.
I was about to walk through a manual new order when my Mac mini screens both popped to life prepopulated with the preset orders. Clicked through both and got 2 15PM - White and Blue Titanium both delivering Sep 22. All completed by about 8:12 am EDT I have seen commonly here and there that 5:10 PDT seems to be the popular time people got in.
I couldn’t help but wonder if what apple experiences here is similar to a DDoS attack? Just too many people hitting the site at the exact same moment cripples it. I am guessing apple has some kind of failover that redirects traffic rather than crashing their site? Once the initial rush is over, things settle back to a manageable level. Don’t crush me here. I know I don’t know what i am talking about (lol). Just speculating a little.
Thinking about site traffic, i have to believe having a few million people do all that active choice and option selection in advance meant more people just like me - connected to the site for 1 minute or less vs the time it can take to chip through all the selections, then go to pages for shipping, payment, etc. On the preset, that was all done in advance and ready to go. I think it was a good call by apple to do that.
The only companies i can think of who have to deal with this kind of traffic in one instant are concert ticket sites. And I bet this traffic still dwarfs that a by few orders of magnitude. I am not sure there IS a way to do this any better. I think it’s light years from camping out in front of the Apple Stores 10-15 years ago. Lol